Processing Raw Images Using RawTherapee

Introduction

RawTherapee is an open-source software for processing raw images. It is available on multiple platforms, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows. It provides a wide range of common tools and features for photographers to perform exposure adjustment, noise reduction, image cropping, etc.

I recently got started using RawTherapee to process raw images. In this blog post, I would like to share some of my experiences and notes of using RawTherapee.

RawTherapee

Installation

On Ubuntu, we can install RawTherapee using the following command:

sudo apt install rawtherapee

Exposure Adjustment

Sometimes, a photo was taken with insufficient lighting or shadows, we could adjust the exposure of the photo using RawTherapee to make it look slightly better, although it does not always save a bad photo.

The exposure could be adjusted under the Exposure tab, Alt + E, on the right panel.

Noise Reduction

By default, RawTherapee does not apply any noise reduction to the photo. However, I think it should be always used to some extent. Otherwise, the exported JPEG photo from raw images from RawTherapee will have a lot of noise pixels. Since the camera always perform noise reduction when producing JPEG images, the exported JPEG photo from raw images from RawTherapee without noise reduction will usually look worse than the JPEG photo from the camera.

The noise reduction could be configured under the Detail tab, Alt + D, on the right panel.

Image Cropping and Resizing

It is very common to crop and resize photos, especially for full-frame camera photos. The image cropping and resizing could be configured under the Transform tab, Alt + T, on the right panel. The shortcut for invoking cropping is C.

Processing Profile Saving and Loading

The processing profile, which includes all the adjustments made to the photo, can be saved and loaded via the buttons on the top right corner of the right panel. By default, when exporting the photo, RawTherapee will save the processing profile in the same directory as the exported photo. The processing profile is saved in a file with the extension .pp3.

References

• RawTherapee - GitHub