Sending my kudos to the RT team!

Software RawTherapee
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As an ex-professional photographer that (almost) completely switched to Linux and ditched Adobe’s photography plan and subscriptions, I had a hard time to find the replacement for Lightroom Classic.

There is one popular open source alternative that I won’t mention here (though it’s probably obvious to everyone), but I always struggled with it.
No file came the way I wanted, no matter how I tried (and I did), especially when compared to LR edits. And the UI was… A LOT to be desired. I just hated working there, like going to the office where you don’t feel good or welcomed.

RT was kind of an old-school open source program that I always knew but it didn’t get much updates and I skipped it. It also appeared to be very slow compared to the alternative.

Luckily, times have changed. Not only RT 5.13 improved in many areas, but the speed also seems to be much better, compared to 5.9 that I last tried.
I compared some edits I did on high ISO files in both LR and RT and they were very much equal (which is great), with RT handling blotched chroma noise even better (no blotches, original color remaining and not smearing!).

Together with its multi-monitor support, beautiful UI, lightning-fast Inspection window, smart batch processing and nice Canon CR3 file handling, it’s now my absolute program of choice for previewing, sorting and editing of RAW files. Just the way LR used to be.

Big kudos to the team for keeping up the great work after many many years! You guys rock. :muscle:

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Kudos also from my side, to both teams!

I like and use both: RT and the other popular open source alternative, you don’t wanna mention.
As a ex-professional software engineer I really appreciate and understand all the hard work done in both teams. :wink:

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Oh for sure.
This post was created mostly as an appreciation thread to the RT team that somehow seemed to lose the spotlight. At one point I even thought dev(s) abandoned it.

It’s also about my real struggle to find the alternative. I find it kind of beautiful that it was RT that brought me back and shrank my W11 partition to bare necessities.

I hope both programs continue to evolve in years to come (and hopefully bypass that super bloated state LR/PS are currently in). Cheers.

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No question, RT has seen many improvements since that release. One thing to remember is that the development team is quite small, so changes come a little slower than other RAW editor apps. That’s not a criticism, by the way. I think they’d rather release a quality product less frequently than rush one out and have to fix bugs right away.

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