Therapee for Photographers

As you know if you've been following my blog, I'm a girl on a budget, which means that my general philosophy when it comes to photo editing software is cheaper=better, free=best.  Of course, it's not a hard and fast rule; obviously a free program that doesn't do what you need it to do is pretty much worthless.  That being said, there are lovely, smart people out on the interwebs who have designed freeware that, admittedly, isn't quite as flashy and straightforward as the Adobe equivalent software, but still does an excellent job of performing the same functions as the very expensive Adobe software.  GIMP is the obvious example, here--the freeware answer to Adobe Photoshop.  Turns out, though, that there's also a freeware equivalent of Lightroom (you may recall I've been using Lightroom on a free 30 day trial, and my last post outlines some of the basic functions of the program if you're interested).  The program is called Raw Therapee, and it's available for download here if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

My initial impression of the program is, overall, positive.  The developers of Raw Therapee have clearly gone out of their way to make the program similar to Lightroom in layout and appearance, and a lot of the controls work in a pretty intuitive way: much like Lightroom, there are sliding bars for most of the functions, and you can enter a numerical value or simply click and drag to make adjustments to your photos.  The program also appears to have all of my favorite Lightroom functions--highlight recovery, luminance recovery, the ability to alter the black point separate from adjusting contrast, etc.  On the downside, the program seems to be struggling to open some of my photos--not many, but a few appear to be compacted, with the gap between the compacted photo and the original size of the photo filled by vertical lines.  Disproportionately this is happening with photos that have been scanned, but it has happened with a few I shot digitally as well, and, in some cases, it can display the original scanned photo fine, but struggles with versions I have edited in GIMP.  I've provided an example so you can see what I'm talking about below.  I'm not sure why this is happening, but it is a definite strike against Raw Therapee; I haven't had any problems like this with Lightroom. 

As you can see, though, the interface is fairly similar to the interface in Lightroom, so the program is fairly user friendly.  I haven't tested this out yet, but it is also supposed to tie in well with GIMP, and, like Lightroom, it allows you to develop images shot in RAW format (if you don't know what RAW format is, just ignore that; if you do, I'm guessing you already know what I mean by develop RAW images).  The other big drawback that I've found so far is that instead of exporting your edited image to the folder of your choosing without ever altering the original, Raw Therapee requires that you save the file using a "save as" function, which increases the likelihood that you could inadvertently save over your original image.  Another thing to note (this isn't necessarily a con for me, but could be for some people) is that there aren't a lot of preset edits in Raw Therapee (i.e. there is a massive list of adjustments--black and white 1, black and white 2, old fashioned, etc. that you can make in Lightroom), so if you rely on preset edits, you may need to do some digging online to find plugins for presets in Raw Therapee.  On the whole, though, it has a wide range of handy tools--as far as I can tell, you can do everything in Raw Therapee that you can do in Lightroom, and some that Lightroom doesn't have as well (and as soon as I can figure out what these tools do, I'll be more specific about that...).  I haven't found it as easy to figure out as Lightroom, but I'm sure with some concentrated time with the manual, things will become more apparent.  That said, I decided to run a quick test to see if the programs can produce the same results: I edited the image below twice--once in Lightroom, and once in Raw Therapee.  I leave you to judge for yourself (keep in mind I've spent about 15 more days with Lightroom than with Raw Therapee, so at least some of the differences you see are, I'm sure, due to my lack of expertise in Raw Therapee).

Lightroom:

Raw Therapee: