14 DAY TRIAL // RawTherapee, an application that specializes in the development of RAW images and that comes with an impressive amount of features, has just reached version 4.1.
RawTherapee is probably one of the most advanced applications of its kind, regardless of the platform, and it can rival other solutions, such as Adobe's Lightroom. To top it all off, the application is completely free and works on virtually any Linux operating system.
Unfortunately, the updates for RawTherapee have been few and far between, taking years to jump from 3.x to 4.x, for example. It's understandable for a free application, especially if we take into consideration the fact that this is a very complex software.
“Spring is here (or autumn, for those on the other side of the planet), and it's a fantastic time to capture nature in its fresh, luminescent-green light (or that intense, golden-red autumn light!), and how better to develop your raw photos than with RawTherapee 4.1-stable!”
“YES! It's been a long journey since the last version we officially called stable, version 3.1. A few years have passed, many new tools and features have been added, a million little bugs were squashed, and now it has arrived!,” said the developers on their blog.
According to the changelog, the Pipette tool has been added for curves, floating-point support has been added for HDR raw DNG images, the visual aspect of all the tools has been improved, the look for crop guides, zoom guides, straightening line, Navigator panel, and detail windows has been improved, the focus mask is now working a lot better, the skin-tones are now targeting contrast, a new algorithm has been implemented for orange, yellow, cyan, purple, and magenta, and the cache and config paths are now set by using the environment variables.
Also, the support for numerous new devices has been improved, RawTherapee's window size and position are remembered between sessions, users can now click anywhere without dragging to clear crop, and much more.
We tested RawTherapee a while back and we found out that this was actually an application for professional artists. Sure enough, it can be used by novice users as well, but you will need to spend a lot of time with it just to learn all the things it can do.
It's a very complex software, but it somehow manages to keep some of the major features very simple, so that regular users can also enjoy it. You can check our review of RawTherapee and you can download the software right now from Softpedia.
You also have to keep in mind that there are no binaries for Linux. You can either get the source package or you will have to wait until it arrives in the repositories.