Docu review done: Mon 03 Jul 2023 16:57:48 CEST

Table of content

General

RawTherapee is an advanced program for developing raw photos and for processing non-raw photos. It is non-destructive, makes use of OpenMP, supports all the cameras supported by dcraw and more, and carries out its calculations in a high precision 32-bit floating point engine.

It can be also used to generate HDR images out of RAW files. This can be done inside the graphical interface and also with the command line interface.

Installation

If you are running Debian for example, you can just use apt to install it.

$ apt install rawtherapee

This will also install you the CLI binary rawtherapee-cli

If you are more into AppImage installation, you can go to there download page https://rawtherapee.com/downloads/ and download it there. They also offer download links for setup files used within Windows and dmg files for macOS.

HDR convert over CLI

To convert RAW (e.g. .nef) files into HDR .png files, without any special settings, you could use the rawtherapee-cli. This is quite useful, to perform such actions on a lot of pictures and only manually adopt where it is needed.

In the below sample, we have a ~800 .nef files, which we want to convert to .png files with best quality, a less compression and 16bit depth per channel and the results get stored in the sub directory ./HDR_pngs.

Keep in mind, this uses quite some disc space

$ rawtherapee-cli -o ./HDR_pngs -n -js3 -b16 -q -c ./DSC_*

To do the same conversion, just from .nef to .jpg, you need to remove some parameters as jpg is the default output format.

$ rawtherapee-cli -o ./HDR_pngs -js3 -q -c ./DSC_*

The default compression for .jpg is set to 92 ( = -js92 ) and bit depth fixed to 8bit, does not matter if you would set the parameter -b16.