Linux for Photography

RAW development: Rawstudio

Anyone who has read some of my previous articles will know that I have a soft spot for Rawstudio. This is the kind of programs that just does the stuff and does it right. It may look almost "blank" compared to the gazillon of features other raw developpers offer, but it offers what you regularly need, clearly and quickly.

(Click to enlarge)

With the (relatively) recent 2.0 release, the dematricing is done by RawSpeed (a dematricing library which focuses on... you guessed it), color management is assured by the new DCP color profiles and all the usual tools are here - worth noting: sharpen (which sort of reveales the texture of the image instead of the usual unsharp mask), level correction (draw a line by dropping 2 points and Rawsudio will align your image vertically or horizontally), denoising (color denoising and "black and white" denoising can be set separately) and lenses correction (vignetting and chromatics aberration, via lensfun). Of course, the list is not exaustive, I just cherry-picked my favorite features.

Rawstudio is also able to display images on your secondary monitor, to do a side by side comparison of the start / edited image and to "lights out" - tame the user interface to reveal your image more. Rawtudio will use however many CPU cores you have available: the user interface is always responsive and batch processing of images is quick.

Missing in Rawstudio is any kind of editing (anything you do with a brush or a gradient) - however you can set 3 different profiles for the same image for easier later recombination / blending. Tagging (although present) is very crude (no sorting, reusing or autocompletion: just type the tags you want for your image). One thing I would like to see added is a "local contrast" tool - something like what you get with an unsharp mask of 30.

Although there are quite a few alternatives for raw processing (Rawtherapee of course, Darktable or even the venerable Ufraw), I keep coming back to Rawstudio for its simplicity, ease of use and speed. I rarely feel like I am missing a feature while at the same time I always appreciate its simple interface, speed and responsiveness.