Introduction

Who starts the raw converter RawTherapee for the first time will certainly be overwhelmed by all its tools and sliders and curves and settings and more. When to use what and why and how?

Well, you can find all the answers to these questions in the excellent RawPedia documentation that comes with RawTherapee (in English, French and Japanese). That said, I thought it would be a good idea to explain some basic ways of processing raw files in a somewhat more illustrated way. In the months to come you can expect articles about auto exposure, tone curves, sharpening and noise reduction, among others. In this context it is good to point out at forehand that you can use RawTherapee to produce excellent results with only a couple of tools. Nobody uses them all at the same time (slider maniacs apart)!

On the home page of RawTherapee you’ll see an entry called downloads. Here you can download versions for Windows and Mac OSX – for free of course as RawTherapee is open source software. Linux versions can be found in the software manager of your specific distribution, while instructions on how to compile the source code yourself – so you always work with the latest version – can be found here.

You’ll also see a link to RawTherapee’s forum. One of the sections there is called Tutorials, that might interest you as well.

Please note that the articles in this section about RawTherapee are written by a (longtime) user of this software, with the aim of making this great raw converter a bit more accessible to newcomers. As such, it is a stand-alone product that is unrelated to the official documentation. Thanks for reading, happy raw’ing.

________
pm|dec15