Raw Therapee 3 Is Now Free Software 162
kantier writes "The only (as far as I know) usable and free (as in beer) program for processing RAW photos outside Windows or OS X is now also free as in freedom. From version 3 onwards, the code is licensed under the GPL v3. The main developer's reasons for opening up the program are a lack of time/resources for full dedication, and a lack of interest in some parts of the program (likes to fiddle with image-processing algorithms, not so much the GUI part) — so the F/OSS model seems to be a perfect fit for this project."
Re:Oh sweet Jesus no (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RAW conversion for GIMP? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for this post! I read the web page, and part of the forums and still never understood that the goddamned program was good for. This is all too common in open source.
Folks- if you're going to put your code out there, then tell the world what the hell it does and what it's good for- not that you've improved the frobulation, and rejiggered the comblastictor.
grumpy
It's a frontend to dcraw (Score:3, Insightful)
Raw Therapee is a frontend to DCraw, which has been around for at least 5 years.
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
The challenge isn't demosaicing the images, nor is there a need for the user to have control over it, assuming it works properly. It's reading the file format; Nikon encrypts theirs, and everyone else changes their formats seemingly with every new model/model year. Makes for an annoying moving target for most of the programs which support raw images, and the entire reason Adobe created an open raw image format, which few companies have moved to support.
Re:Oh sweet Jesus no (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly the problem with FOSS image programs.
GIMP was written by programmers. They add features that they think everyone wants and implements them the way think think is best.
Photoshop was started by photographers. People that wanted to do stuff digitally. It wasn't until I started going through my dad's old photography books that I understood what 1/2 of the tools were and why they were named.
You FOSS zealots can keep on about GIMP, I'll keep getting work done in Photoshop.
Re:Oh sweet Jesus no (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is that a bad thing? If you're going to be fine-tuning and editing photos, you should know what you're doing. If you don't, well, there's always "auto levels" or "auto color" menu options to use, and off you go. For those that do know what they're doing, more advanced tools are available and are called what you expect them to be called.
Re:Developer in for a shock (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Command line experts (Score:2, Insightful)
It may be easier, but creating a good CLI interface does require some degree of thought. If you, for example, compare a Linux console to the dismal Windows terminal and what a pain in the rear that is to use, the difference is blatantly obvious. The UNIX philosophy makes a world of difference.
Yes the difference is blatantly obvious. 10 people on earth can use Unix and Windows has engulfed the world.
Re:Oh sweet Jesus no (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, so you are saying I have to be a photography expert before I can even start to understand the names of things in photoshop. That seems much better.
Yes. That's exactly what we're saying. Just like you have to be a "Compute Expert" and understand what "Mouse" or "Keyboard" is and that a "CD-ROM" goes into the "Tray" or that you need to "Double-Click" on an "Icon" in order to run a program.
Every area has its own vocabulary. Often the names for things are throwbacks to decades or centuries earlier. In the case of photography you can take something like "exposure". In Photoshop exposure has no meaning unless you understand the photographic concept. Similarly in Photoshop the word "Dodge" means nothing unless you understand it from the photographic concept of "dodging" which involves blocking the light of the print in an area and reducing the exposure. Similarly "burning" means selectively extending the exposure to a region of your print. Burn means nothing when you're talking about pixels, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it optically. There are many ways to brighten or darken an image. In the case of Dodge and Burn as an example though you're talking about a very specific type of brightening and darkening.
Re:Uppercase "raw"??? (Score:3, Insightful)
We persist because every similar word is also capitalized (even though most of them actually are acronyms) so it seems sensible to stay within conventions.
File formats are all capitalized:
TIFF
EXR
PNG
JPG
DPX
etc...
Colorspaces and gamma definitions are also often all caps as well:
sRGB
LOG
LIN
Since RGB is all caps it's just common practice to use RAW in all caps to make the distinction that you're referring to a bayer pattern image and not the raw unprocessed data.
Re:Command line experts (Score:5, Insightful)
Not too much of a surprise since the reason most closed source applications have poor CLI is because they just don't care about it.
When all you have is a CLI it better work. When a CLI is just a bonus feature to enable specific workflows and batch operations then the CLI is usually minimal.