RAW CONVERTERS

Historically, DCraw by Dave Coffin (www.dechifro.org/dcraw/) was the first free RAW converter under Linux. The program is available as a pure command line program and initiated a development that led to LibRaw (www.libraw.org). This library is used by modern RAW converters to read in and decode RAW files.

UFraw was an early RAW converter developed mainly for GIMP, which is now replaced by Nufraw. It offers a simple GUI, but hardly any advanced features.

Lightzone (https://archive.org/details/lightzone4.2.0) is a

Java project that is free today. Although it only supports simple processing, its usability and tools are very sophisticated.

Rawtherapee (www.rawtherapee.com) and variant ART (https:// bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/wiki/Home) are classic RAW converters with a whole range of important features. Performance and usability are very good, and the programs are used intensively in production.

Darktable (http://darktable.org) is an extremely powerful RAW converter whose features often overwhelm beginners. The original developer, Johannes Hanika, has since withdrawn from the project. R-Darktable (https://github.com/Aurelien-Pierre/R-Darktable, built by one of the Darktable main developers) is a slimmed-down version of Darktable that is limited to essential functions. Unfortunately, it is not included in the repositories of most distros. This also applies to VKDT (https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt), a new development by Hanika, which relies entirely on GPU editing and is characterised by incredible speed. This project is still at an early stage.