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The best raw image processing tool I know is called “RawTherapee”. It was developed by one or more absolute colour science geeks, it is CLI-scriptable, its comp

The best raw image processing tool I know is called “RawTherapee”. It was developed by one or more absolute colour science geeks, it is CLI-scriptable, its companion RawPedia is a treasure trove of information (I learned many basics there, including how to create DCP profiles for calibration, dark frames, flat fields, etc.), and not to make a dig (fine, to make a bit of a dig) you can see the expertise starting with how it capitalizes “raw” in its name (which is, of course, not at all an acronym, though like with “WASM” it is a common mistake). Beware though that it tends to not abstract away a lot of technicalities, if you dig deep enough you may encounter exotic terms like “illuminant”, “demosaicing method”, “green equilibration”, “CAM16”, “PU”, “nit” and so on, but I personally love it for that even while I am still learning what half of it all means. I’d say the only major lacking feature of RT is support for HDR output, which hopefully will be coming by way of PNG v3 and Rec. 2100 support.

mikae1 1y ago
Local adjustments are really difficult though, as it only supports the good ole "Nik u point" tech. For this reason only I use darktable instead. Would really like to be able to use RawTherapee's dual-illuminant DCPs (not available in darktable).
- donatzsky 1y ago
  ART (Another RawTherapee) has a more Lightroom-like approach to masking that you might like better.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  I can see that it would not work well for cases like painting over parts of the image, which Lightroom et al. allow with ease. If you try to be “holistic” in your raw treatment and like me at most do a graduated filter or mask by colour, RT works well enough (the latest versions improved it a lot, too).
  - mikae1 1y ago
    I do a lot of mild re-lighting. If RawTherapee had the path masks from darktable I'd be more than happy.
    - strogonoff 1y ago
      One way could be exporting lossless 16-bit TIFF or PNG from RT, in some wide colour space and without sharpening, and then doing relighting + final processing steps in another tool… However, if you want to apply a CLUT after relighting then yeah, tricky. It would be great if RT supported something along the lines of “take the entire canvas after initial raw processing but before CLUT and final touches and put it into a temporary file; allow me to do something with it in any other tool; then load it back and apply the rest of the steps on top of that”, but that might require it to store that edited canvas somewhere in addition to .pp3 file.
      - mikae1 1y ago
        Can't stand roundtrips anymore. Yup, I actually apply a LUT after tone mapping in darktable.
        strogonoff 1y ago
        Well, it’s not a roundtrip if you just feed the output to another tool. My processing script typically pushes RT-prepared PNG to something like ffmpeg which may do resizing and more, depending on the end format.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel there's also a fork to play with
appleaday1 1y ago
I like this one its simple and easy to use
- strogonoff 1y ago
  May I ask why choose to shoot raw given simplicity and ease of use are priorities?
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    Those are certainly not mutually exclusive! The point of shooting raw is not to painstakingly tweak super-technical details, it’s to get processing latitude to make photos the way you want. Often that involves simple adjustment of shadows, highlights, saturation and so on, applied to a large number of photos in bulk.
    - strogonoff 1y ago
      The priorities are mutually exclusive: delegating scene data conversion to in-camera engine grants you the most simplicity and ease of use at the expense of control; the territory of technical details grants you the most ability to make the photos looks the way you want at the expense of simplicity. You dial one up, you dial the other down. For example, your choice of demosaicing method can make a tangible difference in finer details: some methods would make them less noisy (better for some styles), others would better preserve finer details (better for other styles). Abstracting it behind one “more detail—less detail” slider isn’t going to work because “detail” can mean a multitude of things, of which sometimes you want one and not the other, and inventing new sliders with user-friendly but inscrutable labels a la “brilliance”, “texture”, and so on, can only get you so far. There are shades between simplicity vs. control, of course, and so I am curious to know the answer from the horse’s mouth so to speak: to what end they choose to compromise simplicity.
      - knorker 1y ago
        I'm not the person you're responding to, but in my hobby experience it's sometimes the difference between a photo being fine or even great, and being completely unusable. If the white balance is set wrong in-camera, then the JPG just came out all blue. It's effectively a black and white photo (albeit in shades of blue), and there's nothing to be done about it. Shot in RAW, the photo can be made color again, extremely easily and quickly. In fact it gets worse, not better, if you on the day try to adjust the white balance, as you go from outdoors to indoors. Not to mention if you change from flash and back. Auto is safer, but when it's wrong, the photo is unusable, and the moment is gone. But my DSLR is now over a decade old. Maybe "auto" has gotten much better? So yeah, for me the main thing is to be able to post facto adjust white balance, which JPG does not support. (if you've done it with both JPG and RAW, you know what I mean when I say "does not support")
Sharlin 1y ago
IME in photo post-processing, good UX, smooth multi-photo workflow and intuitive controls beat technical details every time. RawTherapee is better than Darktable. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear. There are reasons people pay for Lightroom.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  IME GUI is mainly important when you craft a new profile. In many workflows, you don’t do it very often. I create a profile once and then apply it to hundreds of frames without launching the GUI at all or mostly using it just to preview how the profile works with a particular frame and make a couple of minor tweaks.
- simonmales 1y ago
  Partner is getting into photography and I don't have the stomach to purchase some software. I threw darktable and rawtherapee on the table but without technical grit you get nowhere really fast. It's no my wheelhouse so they are mostly in there own.
  - dsego 1y ago
    Pixelmator pro is nice on the Mac, and it's a one time purchase, not even expensive. And CameraBag was not bad last time I tried it, also a one time purchase.
  - josephg 1y ago
    I've been getting into photography lately too and running into the same question. There's no way I'm getting an adobe subscription. But I'm not sure what tools do I want to pick up instead. Apple Photos has gotten me pretty far, but I'm hitting the limits of what it can do. And my photo library is getting pretty big now - big enough that I want some software to manage where my photos live as well.
    - Mashimo 1y ago
      Arrrr, you be a pirate
account42 1y ago
> you can see the expertise starting with how it capitalizes “raw” in its name (which is, of course, not at all an acronym, though like with “WASM” it is a common mistake). Language pedantry has nothing to to with photographic image processing expertise and if anything this would be a sign that the developers care more about being "right" than what users want.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  I disagree; it shows understanding of subject area.
thrtythreeforty 1y ago
I mostly prefer RawTherapee's processing, with one exception: Darktable's stupidly good "filmic" emulation can beautifully recover overexposed raws that I thought were trash. It manages to make it easy to shift the entire scene one or two stops darker with just a few clicks (yes, there is data up there in raws). I have not found an equivalent mechanism in RawTherapee. Does anyone know if it has an equivalent tool?
- igouy 1y ago
  https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Exposure#Highlight_Reconstruction https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Exposure#Highlight_Reconstr...
  - virtualritz 1y ago
    Parent was not talking about highlight reconstruction. DT has a highlight reconstruction module too but RTs was superior every time I tried. They're talking about the Filmic module which is a fancy exposure adjustment curve. I ported it to Rust for use in our internal 2D compositing renderer (not open, unfortunately). That's when I got to appreciate the work done there, really. The gainforge crate has another port, although not with all parameters of the original algorithm, AFAIR. The algorithm is explained in a blog post by the author of the module. [1] Who is btw. the same guy that got fed up with DT dev and forked it to Ansel. [1] https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2018/11/filmic-darktable-and-the-quest-of-the-hdr-tone-mapping/ https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2018/11/filmic-darktable-and-...
    - igouy 1y ago
      Thanks for the correction. After reading the reference I don't feel the need to pursue what seems a bit like a quest.
sitkack 1y ago
https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee
patrakov 1y ago
HDR output is present in ART, which is a fork of RawTherapee. But it is not really usable, as the preview will show the beyond-SDR areas as pure white or something like that. I.e., you will be working blind.
roblh 1y ago
RawTherapee is great in most ways, except that all of the curves for adjusting anything have absolutely catastrophically bad handling. It's so amazing having access to the Lab colour adjustments but the sliders are abysmal, impossible to make any kind of precise adjustments, impossible to reset an individual slider/point back to it's default placement, impossible to undo the last action without resetting the entire widget to its default state. It's unusable, and I'm convinced that the popularity of it would skyrocket if they'd finally just sit down and address that it's miserable to use. I would drop lightroom in a heartbeat if they made them even a little bit better. I know it's a different space, but as a counterexample, FabFilter makes audio plugins that are the gold standard for that kind of interface and it isn't even close. Anybody making an interface for interacting with points on a curve should sit down with the free demo of FabFilters Pro-Q3 for just a few minutes to experience what's actually possible and how it should feel.
- igouy 1y ago
  > impossible to make any kind of precise adjustments That claim does not match my experience in any way. For example, Control Cage curves have node value adjustment to 1/1000th. https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/General_Comments_About_Some_Toolbox_Widgets#Control_Point_In/Out_Values https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/General_Comments_About_Some...
- strogonoff 1y ago
  I think control cage or parametric curves can be quite precise…

mikae1 1y ago

Local adjustments are really difficult though, as it only supports the good ole "Nik u point" tech. For this reason only I use darktable instead. Would really like to be able to use RawTherapee's dual-illuminant DCPs (not available in darktable).

donatzsky 1y ago
ART (Another RawTherapee) has a more Lightroom-like approach to masking that you might like better.
strogonoff 1y ago
I can see that it would not work well for cases like painting over parts of the image, which Lightroom et al. allow with ease. If you try to be “holistic” in your raw treatment and like me at most do a graduated filter or mask by colour, RT works well enough (the latest versions improved it a lot, too).
- mikae1 1y ago
  I do a lot of mild re-lighting. If RawTherapee had the path masks from darktable I'd be more than happy.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    One way could be exporting lossless 16-bit TIFF or PNG from RT, in some wide colour space and without sharpening, and then doing relighting + final processing steps in another tool… However, if you want to apply a CLUT after relighting then yeah, tricky. It would be great if RT supported something along the lines of “take the entire canvas after initial raw processing but before CLUT and final touches and put it into a temporary file; allow me to do something with it in any other tool; then load it back and apply the rest of the steps on top of that”, but that might require it to store that edited canvas somewhere in addition to .pp3 file.
    - mikae1 1y ago
      Can't stand roundtrips anymore. Yup, I actually apply a LUT after tone mapping in darktable.
      - strogonoff 1y ago
        Well, it’s not a roundtrip if you just feed the output to another tool. My processing script typically pushes RT-prepared PNG to something like ffmpeg which may do resizing and more, depending on the end format.
actionfromafar 1y ago
https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel there's also a fork to play with

appleaday1 1y ago

I like this one its simple and easy to use

strogonoff 1y ago
May I ask why choose to shoot raw given simplicity and ease of use are priorities?
- Sharlin 1y ago
  Those are certainly not mutually exclusive! The point of shooting raw is not to painstakingly tweak super-technical details, it’s to get processing latitude to make photos the way you want. Often that involves simple adjustment of shadows, highlights, saturation and so on, applied to a large number of photos in bulk.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    The priorities are mutually exclusive: delegating scene data conversion to in-camera engine grants you the most simplicity and ease of use at the expense of control; the territory of technical details grants you the most ability to make the photos looks the way you want at the expense of simplicity. You dial one up, you dial the other down. For example, your choice of demosaicing method can make a tangible difference in finer details: some methods would make them less noisy (better for some styles), others would better preserve finer details (better for other styles). Abstracting it behind one “more detail—less detail” slider isn’t going to work because “detail” can mean a multitude of things, of which sometimes you want one and not the other, and inventing new sliders with user-friendly but inscrutable labels a la “brilliance”, “texture”, and so on, can only get you so far. There are shades between simplicity vs. control, of course, and so I am curious to know the answer from the horse’s mouth so to speak: to what end they choose to compromise simplicity.
    - knorker 1y ago
      I'm not the person you're responding to, but in my hobby experience it's sometimes the difference between a photo being fine or even great, and being completely unusable. If the white balance is set wrong in-camera, then the JPG just came out all blue. It's effectively a black and white photo (albeit in shades of blue), and there's nothing to be done about it. Shot in RAW, the photo can be made color again, extremely easily and quickly. In fact it gets worse, not better, if you on the day try to adjust the white balance, as you go from outdoors to indoors. Not to mention if you change from flash and back. Auto is safer, but when it's wrong, the photo is unusable, and the moment is gone. But my DSLR is now over a decade old. Maybe "auto" has gotten much better? So yeah, for me the main thing is to be able to post facto adjust white balance, which JPG does not support. (if you've done it with both JPG and RAW, you know what I mean when I say "does not support")

Sharlin 1y ago

IME in photo post-processing, good UX, smooth multi-photo workflow and intuitive controls beat technical details every time. RawTherapee is better than Darktable. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear. There are reasons people pay for Lightroom.

strogonoff 1y ago
IME GUI is mainly important when you craft a new profile. In many workflows, you don’t do it very often. I create a profile once and then apply it to hundreds of frames without launching the GUI at all or mostly using it just to preview how the profile works with a particular frame and make a couple of minor tweaks.
simonmales 1y ago
Partner is getting into photography and I don't have the stomach to purchase some software. I threw darktable and rawtherapee on the table but without technical grit you get nowhere really fast. It's no my wheelhouse so they are mostly in there own.
- dsego 1y ago
  Pixelmator pro is nice on the Mac, and it's a one time purchase, not even expensive. And CameraBag was not bad last time I tried it, also a one time purchase.
- josephg 1y ago
  I've been getting into photography lately too and running into the same question. There's no way I'm getting an adobe subscription. But I'm not sure what tools do I want to pick up instead. Apple Photos has gotten me pretty far, but I'm hitting the limits of what it can do. And my photo library is getting pretty big now - big enough that I want some software to manage where my photos live as well.
  - Mashimo 1y ago
    Arrrr, you be a pirate

account42 1y ago

> you can see the expertise starting with how it capitalizes “raw” in its name (which is, of course, not at all an acronym, though like with “WASM” it is a common mistake). Language pedantry has nothing to to with photographic image processing expertise and if anything this would be a sign that the developers care more about being "right" than what users want.

strogonoff 1y ago
I disagree; it shows understanding of subject area.

thrtythreeforty 1y ago

I mostly prefer RawTherapee's processing, with one exception: Darktable's stupidly good "filmic" emulation can beautifully recover overexposed raws that I thought were trash. It manages to make it easy to shift the entire scene one or two stops darker with just a few clicks (yes, there is data up there in raws). I have not found an equivalent mechanism in RawTherapee. Does anyone know if it has an equivalent tool?

igouy 1y ago
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Exposure#Highlight_Reconstruction https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Exposure#Highlight_Reconstr...
- virtualritz 1y ago
  Parent was not talking about highlight reconstruction. DT has a highlight reconstruction module too but RTs was superior every time I tried. They're talking about the Filmic module which is a fancy exposure adjustment curve. I ported it to Rust for use in our internal 2D compositing renderer (not open, unfortunately). That's when I got to appreciate the work done there, really. The gainforge crate has another port, although not with all parameters of the original algorithm, AFAIR. The algorithm is explained in a blog post by the author of the module. [1] Who is btw. the same guy that got fed up with DT dev and forked it to Ansel. [1] https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2018/11/filmic-darktable-and-the-quest-of-the-hdr-tone-mapping/ https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2018/11/filmic-darktable-and-...
  - igouy 1y ago
    Thanks for the correction. After reading the reference I don't feel the need to pursue what seems a bit like a quest.

sitkack 1y ago

https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee

patrakov 1y ago

HDR output is present in ART, which is a fork of RawTherapee. But it is not really usable, as the preview will show the beyond-SDR areas as pure white or something like that. I.e., you will be working blind.

roblh 1y ago

RawTherapee is great in most ways, except that all of the curves for adjusting anything have absolutely catastrophically bad handling. It's so amazing having access to the Lab colour adjustments but the sliders are abysmal, impossible to make any kind of precise adjustments, impossible to reset an individual slider/point back to it's default placement, impossible to undo the last action without resetting the entire widget to its default state. It's unusable, and I'm convinced that the popularity of it would skyrocket if they'd finally just sit down and address that it's miserable to use. I would drop lightroom in a heartbeat if they made them even a little bit better. I know it's a different space, but as a counterexample, FabFilter makes audio plugins that are the gold standard for that kind of interface and it isn't even close. Anybody making an interface for interacting with points on a curve should sit down with the free demo of FabFilters Pro-Q3 for just a few minutes to experience what's actually possible and how it should feel.

igouy 1y ago
> impossible to make any kind of precise adjustments That claim does not match my experience in any way. For example, Control Cage curves have node value adjustment to 1/1000th. https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/General_Comments_About_Some_Toolbox_Widgets#Control_Point_In/Out_Values https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/General_Comments_About_Some...
strogonoff 1y ago
I think control cage or parametric curves can be quite precise…