RawTherapee Version 5 Arrives in Style…
Here's some good news for those who've been anticipating the release of the new version of RawTherapee, Version 5. This is now a stable release after two years and three months of hard work by the team, with the builds available within a day or two.
For Those New to this Name, Let's Highlight What RawTherapee is
Rawtherapee is a RAW processing app and image editing program with great features and a professional interface, written by Gabor Horvath from Hungary. (Read about its story here).
RawTherapee is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, free to use and not only supports a wide range of RAW formats to include recent cameras, but also a huge list of powerful tools such as curves, highlights, shadow de-noising and advanced sharpening to help you develop RAW photos.
Get yourself here to understand how these tools work, check out RawPedia. There's also a lot of help online where you can share information with users and developers in their shared forums.
Image by RawTherapee
RawTherapee – Top Tips!
To use RawTherapee efficiently, with maximum usability, here's the lowdown:
- Opening up RawTherapee, you will see a screen with loads of panels and other tools in the “Editor” area.
- All panels can be scrolled using the scroll wheel in the mouse.
- Right clicking on a tool will automatically collapse all other tools expanding just that one tool that you right clicked.
- Mouse scroll by holding the shift key to adjust slider values without accidentally changing values for other sliders or settings.
- Points on curves can be dragged using Shift or Ctrl keys for correct movements or positioning.
- Most of all, there are a lot of Keyboard Shortcuts that users can benefit from in order to work on RawTherapee faster.
A quick look to see how to do some basic editing using RawTherapee
So, What's New in Version 5?
- For photographers, there's some good news because version 5 supports almost all RAW formats that also includes unusual formats from cameras that use Foveon and X-Trans sensors. If you have a camera that has a RAW format not supported by RawTherapee, read about how to add support for these raw formats here.
- Some of the most important features that have been added to version 5 are the advanced Wavelets and Retinex tool, automatic chroma noise reduction, manual illuminance noise reduction, post-resize sharpening, new exposure tone curve modes (Luminance and Perceptual), upgrade on the contrast by details level tool, lockable color picker and many more.
- The new version of RawTherapee supports grayscale JPEG and TIFF images and 32-bit TIFF files. There have also been code cleanups and bug fixes that now make RawTherapee 5 a faster and more stable app than it's ever been.
To see how the interface looks and to experience the new features, users will need to wait till the new builds are available.
Summary
RawTherapee may not be a go-to app for all photographers but it's an app definitely worth giving a shot with all its advanced features on board. RawTherapee being an opensource software and using non-destructive RAW post processing, will let users customize it according to their needs, making it a likable app by users who are more into customization.
To get a good idea of all the features and news, read more about RawTherapee 5 and its new features here. If you'd like to keep yourself updated with what is happening at RawTherapee, follow them on their social media page at Google+.
RawTherapee – Further Resources
- RawTherapee 5 Released!
- Editing With RawTherapee by Daniel Hancock
Further Learning
Have you ever been frozen with your thoughts of how you can be a more creative photographer? Well, it happens to the best of us, so have a look at Photzy's Guide aptly named The Creativity Catalog.
Free yourself from that rut and fall back in love with your passion for photography.
