As a total beginner working with the RAW format and photography in general, I found showFOTO and DigiKam more than capable of handling the photos taken from my Sony NEX-3NL saved in Sony's RAW .ARW format. With the intent of learning other applications designed for RAW in Linux, I booted up my Fedora 19 Xfce machine and with Yum browsed for relevant RAW packages. There were several interesting software packages available but I ended up installing Raw Therapee and Rawstudio.
RawTherapee
RawTherapee is a full-featured RAW image editor. Like DigiKam and showFOTO (which I installed on my openSUSE machine), RawTherapee works best with a second monitor or a large display - my EEEPC1000H's humble display was just barely enough for the list of photo-editing tools.
RawTherapee is clearly for the serious photographer and not for a novice like me. Thankfully, the developers took the time out to prepare a 105-page user manual that I referred to so often I loaded it on a separate monitor while testing the application. If you're like me and coming from years of working with Corel Photo-paint and Corel Paint Shop Pro, I highly recommend browsing through the manual. Noise reduction alone has eight adjustment sliders you can tweak. A simple task for cropping the .ARW image confused me somewhat until I realized the display window will still show the rest of the image until you export the final result.
Raw Therapee was surprisingly fast and responsive on my underpowered netbook and processed the RAW files after only brief pauses. In comparison, DigiKam took its time with the same photo. The tools found in RawTherapee may not be intuitive for a budding enthusiast but I'm sure serious users of photo-editing applications would breeze through the settings in no time. Histogram color modes, Snapshots, multiple views and an exhaustive list of tone and color settings are all available.
Continued in RawTherapee and Rawstudio on Fedora Xfce Part 2
0 comments:
Post a Comment