RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor

The best raw image processing tool I know is called “RawTherapee”. It was developed by one or more absolute colour science geeks, it is CLI-scriptable, its companion RawPedia is a treasure trove of information (I learned many basics there, including how to create DCP profiles for calibration, dark frames, flat fields, etc.), and not to make a dig (fine, to make a bit of a dig) you can see the expertise starting with how it capitalizes “raw” in its name (which is, of course, not at all an acronym, though like with “WASM” it is a common mistake).

Beware though that it tends to not abstract away a lot of technicalities, if you dig deep enough you may encounter exotic terms like “illuminant”, “demosaicing method”, “green equilibration”, “CAM16”, “PU”, “nit” and so on, but I personally love it for that even while I am still learning what half of it all means.

I’d say the only major lacking feature of RT is support for HDR output, which hopefully will be coming by way of PNG v3 and Rec. 2100 support.

I like this one its simple and easy to use

May I ask why choose to shoot raw given simplicity and ease of use are priorities?

There's no inherent usability issue with shooting RAW. My experience has been that none of the open source tools can hold a candle to the proprietary ones.

RawTherapee I uninstalled almost immediately because it crashed a few times and the UI didn't seem to jive with what I wanted to do.

Despite DarkTable's horrific interface and hostile developers I keep it around because I can often beat it into submission (but what a chore that is). And that's the thing. Even if I were shooting JPEGs DT's interface would still be a problem.

I fought darktable for two years before feeling right at home. I had used Lightroom since it's inception. I'm happy now I invested the time. I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.

It's not about not "feeling right at home". I've detailed this in other comments but it's just that DT has an abysmal interface and that the devs insist that it needs to be complex. This sort of hostile attitude is part of what spawned Ansel.

  I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.

This is a bit of a myth.

One of my complaints dealt with how unintuitive the sliders are. There's no additional control gained by making the UI widgets difficult to deal with.

Another dealt with trying to set color temperature. There are two places color temperature can be set and they'll both conflict with each other. The newer module is absurdly complex. It's great if you're writing a dissertation on color rendition but less great if you're trying to be productive.

Sure there's more control offered by having ten different demosaicing algorithms to choose from. Unfortunately I can't think of a time when I've needed or wanted that control. Maybe if I shot Fuji or Sigma. But I don't. And most folks don't.

Presets and history are a nightmare. Items in the history widget get aggregated so it's difficult/impossible to pick out individual steps. If you give labels to the actions in a preset (my terminology is off because I've not used DT much in a while)… sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't and things don't appear to pick up the label/group/whatever it's called. If memory serves I had to apply presets in one module to have them visible in the develop module.

The vestigial DAM stuff… ugh.

There's no obvious A/B split views.

Perhaps the most obnoxious thing is that DT shamelessly apes the Lightroom interface but in reality behaves almost nothing like Lightroom. There's a TON of complexity for little-if-any improvement in outcomes.

I try to daily drive Linux but can't find a simple / nice to use RAW editor. I had high hopes for Darktable but I was astonished how bad the GUI is. When trying to delete photo, it deletes the photo under the pointer, not the photo I selected... WTF ?!? And the whole app feels so complicated... Then there's forks emerging and the dev forces are diluted in multiples applications and Adobe continues to milk its users because Open Source dev can't work together. Between Shotwell, Gthumb, Loupe, RT, DigiKam, and more... Imagine if all this efforts was done in one cohesive app ? Ok I stop dreaming.

If you seek a GUI for managing/cataloguing photos, my advice would be to look for that and not a raw image processing tool that incidentally happens to also handle cataloguing (inevitably in a half-baked way).

I have never seen Lightroom (or C1, for that matter) as compelling at all ever since I started using RawTherapee. Unlike, say, InDesign, which is legitimately a difficult to replace professional tool with incredible capabilities, Adobe’s raw image processing offering looks incredibly dumbed down.