RawTherapee

RawTherapee develops raw files from digital cameras. Editing is non-destructive: the tool settings for an image are written to a processing profile stored alongside the file, and the raw data itself is never modified. Profiles can be copied between images or saved as presets, which is how one look gets applied across a whole shoot.

The tools sit in tabs covering exposure and tone, detail, colour, geometric transforms and raw-specific settings. It exposes choices that many converters keep hidden: the demosaicing algorithm can be picked per image, chromatic aberration and hot pixel handling are adjustable, and several tools work on wavelet levels or in Lab space rather than plain RGB. Processing runs at high bit depth, and the built-in file browser can queue images so a batch is processed in the background while editing continues elsewhere.

The application concentrates on developing single frames. It is not a photo library manager, and it has no layer system for compositing.