RethinkRAW: a RAW photo editor built around Adobe DNG Converter

Software
41

I think this might have killed it TBH. I don’t care how useful software is but if you make this statement, you disqualify yourself entirely from any kind of open source perspective. Dead as a doornail, at least to me.

If you’re making money from photography, and find my software useful in your endeavours, you should really license some Adobe photography software yourself. If you hold a valid license to Photoshop/Lightroom/Elements you’re free to use my comparatively small contribution however you want, including commercially.

42

This was not the last thing he said about licensing and usage, and doesn’t appear to reflect the conclusion he eventually came to.

1 Like
43

I know but using the Adobe DNG Converter as core for anything seems like a certain recipe for failure in any situation. That, as well as the earlier remarks such as the one I quoted, also points to a certain way of thinking which I do not feel conductive to any enthusiastic following on the open source side. Too many strings attached IMHO.

1 Like
44

It’s alive in the sense that it is still the only software I personally use to edit RAW photos, which, admittedly, I don’t do a lot of.

Most of my enjoyment with photography is the actual picture taking; editing, for me, is mostly a chore. I also organize my photos in Google Photos, because it’s the easy/lazy thing to do for the other half of decent photos that are taken with the camera I (and my wife) carry at all time: our phones.

So my goal, eventually, is to streamline the process of taking RAWs from SD card into: files for archiving, JPEGs for Google Photos; with the option to actually edit every 1/1000 file, and print it, either at home, or in a minilab (and my minilab accepts Adobe DNGs with edits for printing).

This allows me to do all that, albeit in a kludgy way, and not have use Adobe software I’m not supposed to install in the corporate laptop that I mostly use, unless the company pays for it.

People are free to use binaries and code for anything they want; licence is MIT-0. Contributions to the GitHub project are welcome, both issues and PRs.

Nothing significant has changed, so I haven’t published new builds, but you just want me to update dependencies and rebuild, file an issue on GitHub.

I have kids, a challenging full-time job, some other OS packages to maintain, and, regrettably, I haven’t had the time for more. I wish I did, because every year my unedited photos pile up, and I remind myself “there has to be a better way.” I haven’t found it though (IMO) and haven’t been able to fix it myself (for myself, which is the goal).

6 Likes
45

Made a new release: https://github.com/ncruces/RethinkRAW

New features:

  • updated dependencies
  • Homebrew and Scoop installers
  • a server mode that allows you to run this over a network

Server mode is something I wanted to do for a while. Install this on my “home server”, which has all my photos, edit from a (work) laptop that I can’t even install anything on.

Enjoy (or not)!

2 Likes
46

Bravo, I just tried this new version. Interesting, it works well.
An easy way to compare the results obtained by DT and those by ACR.

2 Likes
47

I finally got round to porting RethinkRAW to Linux.

It requires a working version of Adobe DNG Converter running under Wine, but that’s pretty much it. No further configuration necessary, it should just work.

You can download the latest release from:

2 Likes
48

Thank you - I tried it under macOS 11.7, but it does not open (“is damaged and cannot be opened”). Any hint?

1 Like
49

To run on macOS, applications must be signed by Apple, otherwise they’re considered “damaged” by default. This process costs around $100/year, and requires some paperwork that I don’t intend to go through at this time, for what’s essentially a hobby. I’m sorry.

It used to be possible to bypass this safety check by simply ctrl-clicking (instead of double-clicking) the app to open it. That doesn’t seem possible anymore.

If you want to run the app anyway, there are 3 remedies, all of which require using the Terminal:

  • use Homebrew :beer: to install the app:
    – brew install ncruces/tap/rethinkraw
  • use curl to download the dmg, then install the app:
    – curl -L https://github.com/ncruces/RethinkRAW/releases/latest/download/RethinkRAW.dmg > ~/Desktop/RethinkRAW.dmg
  • remove the quarantine flag from the app after installing it:
    – xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/RethinkRAW.app

It’s totally understandable if you don’t want to mess with any of these. These security measures are put in place to prevent spreading of malware. Unfortunately, hobbyists are caught in the process.

Edit: being open source, the other alternative is to download and build directly from source, which is actually very easy as long as you have Go.

50

I tried the third method, remove the quarantine flag. Unfortunately, now I get the following error message:
Error: Error: The application /Applications/RethinkRAW.app/Contents/Resources/RethinkRAW.app cannot be opened for an unexpected reason, error=Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-10825 “kLSIncompatibleSystemVersionErr: The app cannot run on the current OS version” UserInfo={_LSLine=3878, _LSFunction=_LSOpenStuffCallLocal}

There seems to be some confusion regarding the minumum OS version:

  • info.plist states 10.6 as minimum OS version

  • directly starting /Applications/RethinkRAW.app/Contents/Resources/RethinkRAW.app brings another error message, this time requesting 13.0 (Ventura).

  • On the download page, 10.13 (High Sierra) is stated as the minimum version.

I am on 11.7.

51

I tried installing the “Linux native” version which IMHO is as far from anything resembling Linux native as possible.

The upside is that it works, loads a camera-specific raw file (Pentax KP PEF in my case), displays its contents after some hesitation, allows me to make some changes which have almost uncontrollable results and then save the result as a jpeg, DNG or both.

The downsides are just far too may. This is not a “RAW photo editor” by any stretch of the word. This more or less equates to shooting jpegs in-camera with little control over outcome, file size and/or quality of results.

Taking the results which to me look totally overcooked, probably what Adobe has determined its customers are most likely to favor: bright and very lively colors which almost hurt the eye. Very little microcontrast other than a fake USM approximation and a color curve which does away with any finesse.

Then on to file sizes: the jpeg is almost impossibly small at 5.9Mb for a 24mp file, result of lots of lossy compression I suppose. I don’t think I would want to have a very good DSLR and then loose so much detail in saving.

The DNG is enormous. Whereas the original PEF comes in at 34Mb, the resulting DNG is double that at a whopping 68Mb

The space required on-disk also has a huge footprint: with 74.5Mb for the program directory plus another 162Mb for the Adobe DNG converter itself (plus the various bits and pieces strewn all over the various Windows subdirectories) RethinkRaw hogs almost a third of a Gb of diskspace.

For comparison, Darktable installs into 29Mb and RawTherapee is slighly bigger at 104Mb. Darktable outputs that same PEF file as a 25.8 Mb jpeg with a lot more microdetails and far better colors and contrast.

So I just have to ask: what is the point and why call it a “RAW photo editor” rather than a “ADC shell” if you have not added, augmented or changed any of the editing options offered by ADC and limit the 8-bit output to low quality jpeg?

52

Thanks for the detailed report. I’ll look into it. Sorry for your bad experience.

The “outer” RethinkRAW.app is an AppleScript launcher that just handles file associations, compiled withosacompile. It’s not surprising that backwards compatibility goes way back.

The “inner” RethinkRAW.app is a Go binary wrapped by “hand” into an app bundle, with manually a written plist. I probably botched this. The release notes says 10.13 because that’s what Go 1.19 says it supports. The only thing special about this binary is that it is dual architecture (amd64/arm64)? Maybe that’s the root cause.

I can only really test on Ventura, which is what I have installed.

The binaries for the macOS zenity port (that I similarly created) use a similar build process. I would’ve hoped to have had negative feedback on those as well (since it’s a far more popular tool).

53

Thanks again @geni1105!

There was an issue with the build that did make the binaries incompatible with anything but macOS 13. Should be fixed now:

54

Thank you - now it works :slight_smile:
Nice program!

1 Like