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.

IME in photo post-processing, good UX, smooth multi-photo workflow and intuitive controls beat technical details every time.

RawTherapee is better than Darktable. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear. There are reasons people pay for Lightroom.

Because those open-source editors are made by coders, not photographers.

Those tools you really need for properly edit raws are hidden in blated features (multiple demosaic algorithms) or completely missing (AI masking). And UI is not user friendly.