RawTherapee and Rawstudio on Fedora Xfce Part 2‏

Continued from RawTherapee and Rawstudio on Fedora Xfce Part 1

Here are a few tips users might find useful while running RawTherapee:

1. There are interface issues related to the toolbar and navigator if you install Raw Therapee on a Fedora Xfce Linux distribution or a machine with a small monitor or display. I highly recommend using a second monitor if you're running RawTherapee on a portable.




2. If you have an older version of Gimp installed on your Linux machine before installing RawTherapee or Rawstudio, you may break Gimp or you may have to reinstall an updated version.

3. On first load, RawTherapee uses a grey-grey theme that makes the text and controls very difficult to read. I'm not sure if this was because I was running an Xfce desktop environment but to change Raw Therapee's GUI theme, click the Preferences button on the upper-right hand corner and select the Use system theme box.




4. As expected, you can find the manual at /usr/share/doc/rawtherapee-doc-4.0.11 in Fedora as long as you included the documentation during installation.

Raw Studio

Between Rawstudio and RawTherapee, Rawstudio is deceptively simpler to use. Rawstudio approaches RAW editing differently and users have to access online documentation to fully understand and make full use of Rawstudio's capabilities. Essentially, Raw Studio puts quick export to a usable file format and batch processing front and center with easy to access image controls and tone curves for incremental editing.

RAW power

It's not with a little bit of chagrin that I found myself intimidated by the number of controls RawTherapee has for editing RAW images. As mentioned in a previous article, I actually preferred the more straightforward showFoto over the more serious DigiKam and my opinion hasn't wavered even after using RawTherapee for a few hours to fiddle around with my Sony .AZW photos.

I have nothing but praise for exceptionally well-written open source software such as Rawstudio and RawTherapee and it's more my inadequate skill than anything else that keeps me from wholeheartedly recommending both applications. More than anything else, playing around with RAW image editing software made me realize you have to get your photos right the first time and hopefully avoid having to do any further digital editing.