Free Program RawTherapee Gets Huge Update: New Tools, Bug Fixes & More

Fans of free have something to celebrate. The popular open-source RAW photo processor RawTherapee has received a massive update to version 5.0. The update including a bunch of new features, performance enhancements, some bug fixes, and much more.

With Lightroom’s reputation as a serious slow-poke and CPU-killer intact, many photographer have been looking to open-source options like RawTherapee as cheap (indeed, free) alternatives to Adobe’s industry standard. And with the release of RawTherapee 5, the coders behind the free processor are making that switch all the more tempting.

(Plus, if you’re shooting a Fuji camera with an X-Trans sensor—and an increasing number of people are—a third-party program like RawTherapee is all but necessary)

The new version includes several new features—the Wavelets tool, the Retinex tool, automatic chroma noise reduction, manual luminance noise reduction using sliders and curves, post-resize sharpening, “Luminance” and “Perceptual” tone curve modes, and a lot more you can read about here. Additionally, RawTherapee 5 boasts “over two years worth of amazing speedups, code cleanups and bug fixes, making it faster and more stable than ever before!” In the battle between Darktable and RawTherapee, RT may have just scored some serious points.

The newest build is available for download for Windows and Mac users alike at this link. It’s free, so if your Lightroom-shaped chains are chafing and you’d like to shake things up, we see no reason why you wouldn’t give RawTherapee a shot.

(via DPReview)