RAW Therapee - It's Free!!

No I'm not talking about a free new age psychotherapy session. I'm talking about a really capable RAW photo editor that also handles JPEGs if you don't shoot in RAW. And best of all it's free. Todays digital cameras take pretty good photos. Even our smartphones take decent pictures. But they don't always get it right. That's when you need post processing software. Enter RAW Therapee. Below is a photo I recently took of a group of people milling around waiting to take a group photo. They were in the sun and I was standing under a shade canopy. You can see a part of the canopy as well as items on the ground also in the shade. In my opinion the camera didn't do a very good job with this photo. It seems to me to be rather dull and underexposed. I shot this as a RAW photo. This sort of things happens and what do you do if it was an important picture that you wanted to share with friends and family? Do you just trash it? Send it to them as is and apologize because it didn't turn out better? Or do you fix it with photo editing software? I always opt to fix it.

To fix it I opened it in RAW Therapee and clicked on the Auto Level button. A single click gave me the photo below. The people in the photo as well as the background are now properly exposed and the colors are much more vibrant. A big improvement in my opinion and just a single click in a free program.

The items in the shade are still under exposed and you might not care about that but if you did RAW Therapee has a fix for that. I slide the Shadow slider to the right a little ways and the results is the photo below. Less than a minute to open the photo, click the Auto Level button, and adjust the Shadow slider and the photo is now an acceptable photo that comes close to what my eyes were seeing.

Is it a keeper. In this case no but only because it is not an interesting subject and not because it is dull and lifeless. But if you ever end up with a photo like the first one but you have good subject matter and good composition or it is an important picture then RAW Therapee can rescue it and do so quickly. RAW Therapee has many more features which would make it worth paying for but you can get it for free. It has decent documentation and appears to have an active users forum. For more information about RAW Therapee check out this LINK. http://rawtherapee.com/ If you like free then keep watching these posts. In the future I will highlight more free software.