Best RAW photo editing tool?

[Bill Ricker]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Marc Nozell (marc at nozell.com)
<nozell at gmail.com> wrote:
> dcraw
> darkroom
> rawstudio
> rawtherapee
> ufraw (also the default tool used by gimp and f-spot)

Add one to the list. Fotoxx, which is my preferred tool for JPEG photo
edits, now handles RAW file natively, no longer by just shelling out
to ufraw&dcraw. Caveat, since Mike avoids integer math overflow pixel
problems by using FLOATs, so don't expect snappy performance on a
limited machine with large RAWs !  With small files or big memory it's
pretty snappy though, and just works -- more what do you want to
accomplish and less how should it do it, like a complete set of
PhotoShop / Gimp plugins, without the rest of PS/Gimp.

I've tried all the above except rawstudio (I'll add that to my To Do
list!).  I will still sometimes do Raw 'developmet' in 'ufraw' when it
needs significant exposure correction and save as TIFF16 and a resized
TIFF16  or JPEG before finishing in Fotoxx. Sufficiently that I asked
Mike to restore the Open-with-Ufraw option to Fotoxx.

I've tried 'darktable' but haven't figured it out. I think it has
workflow promise if I ever figure it out.

For many purposes, RawTherapee would be better for RAW us, if I didn't
have Fotoxx to do phase 2 in. Very nice selection of What do you want
knobs instead of How To Mash Pixels knobs. I should use it more.

'dcraw' is what Fotoxx and likely everyone else uses for batch.
Doesn't do resize-while-convert, alas.

bill








-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux