Xmas has come early for open-source photography enthusiasts as a brand-new version of Rawtherapee – the first update in two years — is now available to download.
RawTherapee 5.9 introduces a new Spot Removal tool, ideal for removing dust specks and small imperfections from images, a new Local Adjustments tool, and a new Perspective Correction tool that includes a handy automated perceptive correction option.
Alongside a new automatic white balance method in the White Balance tool there’s a new Preprocess White Balance tool (in the ‘Raw’ tab). This lets you specify if channels should be balanced automatically or if a white balance value recorded by the camera should be used instead.
The Color Appearance & Lighting tool (‘Advanced’ tab) now includes CAM16 (color appearance model). This takes “…into account the conditions of the photographed scene and the conditions under which the image is viewed, it allows you to adjust the image in a way which matches human color perception.”
Other notable changes:
- Improved Wavelet Levels tool
- Crop tool has a ‘centered square’ crop guide
- Film Negative tool now supports non-raw files
- Main Histogram gains waveform, vectorscope and RGB parade modes
- Dual-demosaicing methods in the Demosaicing tool
- Saturation adjuster in Haze Removal tool
- Resizable Navigator
- Improved support for various cameras, raw formats and color profiles
You can learn a lot more about many the new features in RawTherapee 5.9 in a post on the project blog.
RawTherapee is free, open source software available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Linux users can download RawTherapee 5.9 as an .AppImage from the project website. AppImages run on all modern Linux distributions, Ubuntu included, once the binary is given permission to run.
Alternatively, you can get the latest stable release of Rawtherapee on Flathub.
- (via: Ubuntu Handbook)