News

2019

Repackaged Windows Build

Please download the Windows 5.7 build again, and re-install it. The original Windows build of RawTherapee 5.7 contained an error in the way it was compiled and packaged, causing it to behave the way our development builds behave - the default installation folder was of the development build form, and it looked for settings in the location where a development build would store them. The error was corrected, and the build has now been replaced with a new one which behaves the way a stable release should behave.
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We Have a New Website!

We have a new website! Thank you very much Pat David and Mica!

2018

New RawTherapee 5.4 AppImage

Linux users whose distributions do not ship RawTherapee 5.4 can now enjoy our latest stable release by getting the RawTherapee 5.4 AppImage from our Downloads page. An AppImage is a single file which contains all the components necessary to run a program in any Linux distribution. As some distributions provide old versions of certain programs, the AppImage is a great solution for letting users of those systems run the latest version of a given program.
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2017

Support Freedom, Donate a Kidney!

You can help not only RawTherapee, but the open-source photographic community as a whole, and it won’t cost you a dime nor a kidney. You don’t even need to know how to code. Here’s how. RawTherapee is open-source software, which means we value liberty, and it’s thanks to this principle of liberty that our project exists. We are not alone. There are other libre projects out there, related to photography and imaging, and we are friends, and we share our skills for mutual benefit.
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Linux repositories updated

All Linux repositories have been updated and the naming of the RawTherapee packages has changed. Check the information for your distribution on our Downloads page to make sure you’re using the correct package.

5.0-r1 Downloads Ready

You can now download RawTherapee 5.0-r1 for Windows and macOS from our Downloads page. Linux users can get it from the usual place - their package manager; instructions available on our Downloads page. Windows users: If you ran into the “There is no disk in the drive” error, we just updated the installer with a version which uses GTK+ 3.18 which does not exhibit this problem. It’s a fast “release” type build and it also includes a “debug” executable.
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2016

RawPedia Back Up and Running

With the fine help of Pat David we have managed to get RawPedia back up and running! It is and will remain accessible through the same sub-domain as always - rawpedia.rawtherapee.com For now the domain will change to pixls.us once you go there (the same domain where we have our shared forum), but in the near future the whole RawPedia will remain available under the rawtherapee.com domain. Update 2016-12-31: It is done, the whole RawPedia now resolves to rawpedia.
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RawPedia temporarily down

We are aware that our RawPedia server stopped accepting connections within the last few hours and are busy working to restore service. The cause of the problem lies outside our control and may take a few days to work around. Follow progress in issue #3550. In the meanwhile you are welcome to use our shared forum at discuss.pixls.us

Forum migration

We have moved forums! In the loving and collaborative spirit of open-source, we decided to migrate from our old phpBB forum to our new home: http://rawtherapee.com/forum This brings you and us closer to the users and developers of other libre graphics software. Newcomers will settle right in, just be sure to first read this introductory post. Users of the old forum will want to start by reading this post which explains how you can access the old forum and what will happen with it.
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2015

We moved our code to GitHub

As of today, we have stopped using Google Code as our source code host and issue tracker, and now use GitHub. https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee Package maintainers please take notice and update your sources. The buildRT script for Linux will be updated within the next few days. Issue discussions are being moved right now, and will be done within a few hours.

Documentation

RawPedia RawPedia is the only official source of documentation for users. Read RawPedia here: rawpedia.rawtherapee.com Developing raw images is a breeze when you know what it is you want to achieve, and when you know the tools you have at your disposal. The RawPedia wiki contains articles which describe every tool and topic related to RawTherapee, and more. Reading it will answer most of your questions, it will give you greater power and maneuverability in getting the most out of RawTherapee’s tools, and it will save you time!
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PLAY RAW 46 Competition Started

Try your hand at developing a raw image by taking part in the latest edition of our competition, PLAY RAW 46! This round’s image is from DrSlony and it is a high dynamic range DNG of a sunrise near Söderåsen National Park in the south of Sweden. This is what the image looks like with the “Neutral” processing profile. Take part in PLAY RAW 46 now!

2014

4.2 Pre-Release Announcement

Dear package maintainers! We will be releasing RawTherapee-4.2 this Friday, 2014-10-24. Please take a minute to read this announcement. Please make your builds use cache and configfolders called just “RawTherapee” without any version suffix. This can be done by setting the following option: \-DCACHE\_NAME\_SUFFIX="" In the past we requested that a clean cache and config folder is created by appending the RawTherapee version. We hope that that move has accomplished its purpose, and now strive to offer a seamless and stable upgrade process to users by re-using these files.
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PLAY RAW 44 Competition Started

Try your hand at developing a raw image by taking part in the latest edition of our competition, PLAY RAW 44! This round’s image is from siganmelostontos and it is an in-camera double exposure. This is what the image looks like with the “Neutral” processing profile. Take part in PLAY RAW 44 now!

PLAY RAW 43 Competition Started

Try your hand at developing a raw image by taking part in the latest edition of our competition, PLAY RAW 43! This round’s image is from TooWaBoo. “This picture was taken in Bisbee, Arizona, near the Mexican border. Bisbee was founded as a copper, gold, and silver mining town. Today many dropouts and artist live there. It has its own brewery, old houses and nice little bars with live music every day.
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PLAY RAW 42 Competition Started

Try your hand at developing a raw image by taking part in the latest edition of our competition, PLAY RAW 42! This round’s image is from myself, DrSlony, and it’s a macro of a tiny flower which, hanging upside-down from the plant together with 18 other flowers just like it in a bunch, produces a drop of sticky liquid every morning to, I presume, lure pollinating insects in. Can you identify the genus or species?
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PLAY RAW 41

It’s been four years and counting that we’ve been doing a ~monthly competition where the winner of the previous round gets to send in an interesting raw file and everyone is invited to stretch their creative ligaments and do anything possible, as long as it’s with RawTherapee, to develop it. This round’s image is from FredDec, and it’s a great scene of the Bardenas Reales Desert in Spain, taken at dawn.
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4.1 Pre-Release Announcement

Dear photographers, hobbyists and package maintainers, Soon we will be releasing RawTherapee version 4.1-stable. This is a big deal. Everyone should read this. Much has changed since version 3.0 of RawTherapee was released back in July 2011. There are many new tools, the way existing tools work has been improved, calculations are more precise, everything is faster, the user interface had a complete make-over, everything is documented in RawPedia, and there are hundreds of other improvements which make up the bulk of our work.
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Links fixed

The download link for the 4.0.12 build of RawTherapee for Windows and the 4.0.12 PDF have been fixed.

2013

Downtime - Moving Servers

We will shortly be moving to a new server which may result in temporary downtime. If the website and forum do not work, simply come back a few hours later, by when the migration should be completed.

Can you help?

RawTherapee flourishes thanks to the hard work of the people who continue to push their boundaries and to spend their free time creatively and actively contributing to a wonderful global effort. You too can join us and help make RawTherapee better while gaining experience and learning from others. Please take a look at the list below which details areas where we need help, and see if you could lend a hand!
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Features

For a complete and up-to-date list of features, see the RawPedia Features page. High Image Quality 96-bit (floating point) processing engine. Non-destructive editing. Get the most details and least artifacts from your raw photos thanks to modern and traditional demosaicing algorithms: AMaZE, DCB, AHD, EAHD, HPHD, IGV, LMMSE, VNG4, Mono and Fast. Advanced color handling from white balance to HSV (Hue-Saturation-Value) curves, color toning and color management including wide-gamut and soft-proofing support.
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Quick update

After many months of hard work, we will be releasing RawTherapee 4.0.10 in a few days - it is faster, more stable, has a bunch of new features, and is generally better than any other version, so stay tuned! We have also updated the Documentation and Screenshots pages, with further updates coming to the other sections soon.

2012

We are looking for Mac builders

We are looking for Mac builders. RawTherapee is a cross-platform raw development tool, but due to the lack of Mac builders our latest release on this platform is 4.0.6 (compared to the currently planned 4.1). Requirements: minimal experience in cmake and compiling C++ source code on Macintosh platform regular availability (e.g. willing to follow the project and build prior to releases) access to multiple versions of Mac OS X is a plus, but not a must have
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RawTherapee Tutorials Needed

Tutorials are important to help new users and are an easy yet rewarding way of sharing knowledge. We opened a dedicated forum section and encourage everyone to submit tutorials. Requirements are described in the instructions, please read them before posting. Finished, high quality tutorials will be announced in the news too. Happy contribution!

RawTherapee evolution and statistics

As of today, it’s been two years that RawTherapee has been free open source software and it has grown tremendously! Here is a video which visualizes progress on RawTherapee during these two years, from the 1st of January 2010 till now, the 1st of January, 2012, and some statistics. Enjoy! Created using Gource, watch in 720p high quality and read the video description at YouTube Statistics Source code Date of initial import into Mercurial from the previous source code repository: Friday, 1 January 2010, 11:52 a.
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2011

Progress report for August 2011

The following changelog details a list of items that have been fixed and/or implemented in the development branch of RawTherapee from the 31st of July till the 31st of August, 2011: Color probes and clipping indicators were using the working color space values instead of the output color space ones. Also RT would fallback to using the sRGB color space for the processed photos if the chosen output profile not match the working profile.
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PLAY RAW 16

The 16th PLAY RAW competition just started, you have until the 13th of September to submit your entry, but better do it now!

Maximizing memory efficiency

RawTherapee is a modern program, and as such should be run on modern hardware. This is especially true if you use high resolution raw files. It features some memory-intensive filters, which means you need to be aware of a few things in order to avoid having memory issues. These issues, which usually manifest in program crashes, are most evident if you use a 32 bit version of Windows, although they apply to other operating systems as well, and may become evident if you have 2GB of RAM or less.
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Progress report for July 2011

The following changelog details a list of items that have been fixed and/or implemented in the development branch of RawTherapee from the 19th of June till the 31st of July, 2011: Fixed issue when using false color suppression on very overexposed photos where whites turned grey. Threading improved. Case-insensitive “find” toolbar in file browser to search by filename. Ability to display said toolbar in two rows. Stability improvements. Fixed numerous bugs that made RawTherapee freeze for short periods of time.
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PLAY RAW 14

The submission period for the 14th PLAY RAW competition starts today folks, come and take part!

RawTherapee PLAY competitions

Roughly every three to four weeks we run a new PLAY RAW competition. Everyone may enter and there is no registration required. Simply check the “PLAY RAW competitions“ forum for an ongoing competition, read the rules, download the raw file, develop it using only RawTherapee and submit the JPG and PP3 files to narvik86 by email. The submission period is two weeks, after which there is a week for casting votes, and everyone may vote.
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A quick note on the word 'raw' and LittleCMS version 2

I would like to point two unrelated things out: The word “raw” is a plain word. It is not an acronym or an initialism. As such, the usual noun capitalization rules apply. Writing RAW is incorrect. If starting a sentence, capitalize the first letter, leave the other two in lowercase. If in the middle of a sentence, all letters should be lowercase. The unstable RawTherapee-3.1 builds require LittleCMS version 2.
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Progress report

It is our pleasure to inform you of the progress made in RawTherapee since the last report! We have repeatedly decided to push back the release of the version we would call 3.0 in order to deliver a program that you can expect the best quality and optimal speed from, one you can entrust your photos with and rely upon. During this time many improvements have been made, much code has been refactored, memory leaks plugged and stability improved.
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RawTherapee.com v3 - The New Homepage!

Welcome to the new homepage of RawTherapee! Rawtherapee.com has evolved from a few simple pages through a basic dynamic site to the current, advanced homepage. This new site was carefully planned and designed to be a real home of RawTherapee. Versions of the homepage from the beginning Most of the changes are under the hood, but you may have already noticed the blog and hopefully will soon discover the new, powerful download center as well.
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2010

Feature Freeze - 3.0 branch

We are happy to announce the feature freeze of RawTherapee 3.0! A feature freeze is a point in the development process when no more new features are accepted for the current branch. In accordance with the RT 3.0 Roadmap the project arrived to this point. Branching We would like to call the attention - especially of the developers - to the changes in the source tree: ‘3.0_branch’ is the new branch for the upcoming stable release; accepts only bug fixes and GUI enhancements.
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RawTherapee 3.0 Roadmap

From now every major release will have a roadmap. Each will be named after the current release, they detail the current trends and draft the future plans. Please note that roadmaps are not laws carved in stone: these are indeed plans which may change with time. The current one for the 3.0 branch can be found below: this is how RT OSMC (in alphabetical order: DrSlony, dualon, ejmartin, Gabor, Hombre, janrinze, paul.
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New Developers in RT OSMC

Based on your feedback and the outstanding activity of Hombre and Emil, both of them were invited into the RT OSMC! We are glad to announce that the current line-up of the team is (in alphabetical order): DrSlony, dualon, ejmartin, Gabor, Hombre, janrinze, paul.matthijsse, TheBigOne. Best wishes to you, guys, and thanks for all your efforts!

Download page revised

The Download section has been revised. It should now fully and comprehendibly explain to a new user where RawTherapee stands, and make clear what the advantages and disadvantages of using the latest stable but outdated version (2.4.1) or the latest bleeding edge builds are. If you feel that something is missing, worded in an unclear way, or you have a suggestion, please tell us about it in the General Discussion forum.
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Get The Latest Releases

The latest official release is alpha1 from January. A lot has changed since then. The “release early, release often” model is planned to be followed to satisfy you with new builds and to appreciate and show the efforts of the developers. Therefore some new builds are provided to play with until the bugs (program errors) are ironed out and the next “official” release can be published. The latest releases are available in this directory and are updated regularly:
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The RawTherapee Open Source Management Comittee

The brief history and the most active contributors were mentioned in our last article. This time the future of RawTherapee will be discussed. Opening the source was an excellent step, it has resulted in a lot of new features and involved a bunch of really enthusiastic volunteers already. However, without a pacemaker person or comittee the project seems to just drift, the need for a centralized steering “institute” is stronger with every day.
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Back In Time - RawTherapee From 2004 Till 2010 Today

Apart from numerous minor cosmetic, performance, usability and stability improvements, quite a few major new features have been and are being added, but we should start at the beginning - the birth of RawTherapee. RawTherapee was born in 2004 when Gabor Horvath, from Hungary, bought his first digital camera. He immediately developed an interest in how the final JPEG image was obtained from raw data. Being a PhD student at the time, he had access to several image processing journals where he found information on relevant algorithms.
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New Language pack: new language files and preparations for 3.0

Please be informed about the new language pack available for RawTherapee 3.0 alpha1 and earlier (This language packs are also usable on other RT 2.4 version and RT 2.3). There are a few strings in it regarding 3.0alpha1 (but not all strings are translatable yet). The following things changed since the last language pack: new language: Brasilian Portuguese updated languages: latvian, english, russian added new available strings to all files (not all available yet) Many thanks to all contributors for their efforts.
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RawTherapee 3.0 alpha 1 and license changes

The first alpha version of RawTherapee 3.0 is available for download. Note that this is not a feature complete version. In V3.0 both major GUI/workflow and algorithm changes are planned. This alpha version demonstrates the new, much more efficient GUI, but it does not contain any algorithmic changes yet. The most significant changes in the GUI are the following: multi-tab interface the real batch processing support arrived: select multiple images and adjust them together (the multi-adjust behavior of some parameters is selectable in the preferences dialog: they can be either additive or absolute) completely re-written editor: preview and detail view are now gone.
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2009

Documentation for Raw Therapee v2.4

If you want to understand how to work with Raw Therapee even better, we recommend to read the users manual. You can download it in PDF format: Users Manual for RT v2.4 (english), last change: 2009-09-04 Manuel pour RT v2.4 (french), last change: 2009-09-20, write errors corrected Benutzerhandbuch für RT v2.4.1 (german), last change: 2009-10-21 Manuale dell’utente di RT 2.4 (italian), last change 2009-02-08 Japanese Users Manual for RT v.
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RawTherapee v2.4 released

After a long beta cycle we are proud to announce RawTherapee v2.4! Changelog (from v2.3): Exif/IPTC support Theme switching Improved GUI layout Improved filebrowser Ranking support Basic file operations possible (delete, remove, rename) Filtering based on Exif data Configurable thumbnail caching Live thumbnails (showing the images in the processed state) Resizable thumbnails Configurable thumbnail layout (left - right, top - down) Basic batch processing Controllable workqueue Copy/Paste processing profiles (or only parts of them) Direct sending of images to the workqueue Improved auto-exposure and spot white balance “Send to Editor” feature (Gimp, Photoshop, custom editor) The long delay in the recent months was partially caused by the lack of time devoted to bug fixing and by the solution of a critical bug in shadow & highlight enhancement method.
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Windows installer of the release candidate updated

I had to withdraw the windows installer since I made a mistake when making the package. I have updated it, so from now you can download the correct installer again. If you were so fast that you downloaded the RC of RawTherapee in the past few hours please be so kind and do it again. I apologize, Gabor

2008

Status report of RawTherapee 2.4 milestone 2

One important goal of the RT DevTeam is to inform you about what’s going on behind the scenes. This time we can’t offer any downloads, but some information about the progression. Please let us emphasize: no downloads this time, “only” great news! Milestones are “development snapshots”, parts of longer and greater improvements. However, the second milestone towards RawTherapee 2.4 offers so much that it’s development lasts longer then originally planned.
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Documentation for Raw Therapee v2.3

If you want to understand how to work with Raw Therapee even better, we recommend to read the users manual. You can download it in PDF format: Users Manual for RT v2.3 (english) Manual de usuario RT v2.3 (espanol) Manuel pour RT v2.3 (french) Benutzerhandbuch für RT v2.3 (german) Manuale RT v2.3 (italian) Here are some additonal informations: Internal Workflow of RT v2.3 (english) Plan de Proceso Interno de RT v2.
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Towards RawTherapee v2.4 - The First Milestone

First of all thank you for the feedback and bug reports, RT is improved with every little piece of information. The RT DevTeam would like to encourage everyone: help us this way in the future, too. Our forum is open to all of you! The development of RawTherapee v2.4 has reached the first milestone. The features below are implemented already: Full EXIF support: The long-waited feature is here, RawTherapee is able to import EXIF data from RAWs and export to the output image formats, including TIFF.
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Development snapshot: Download RT v2.4m1

Explanation about ‘Development snapshot’ Releases: This release is not a final product, it is something between a ‘Developer Snapshot’, a ‘Milestone Release’, a ‘Beta Version’ and a ‘Release Candidate’. Therefore it could contain features that are not yet completely implemented and could also contain some more bugs as a STABLE release. The idea behind this Releases is to give users a first idea about the features and get first feedback from the users about still existing bugs in the product.
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RawTherapee v2.3 released

We are proud to present RawTherapee version 2.3! Changelog: Image resizing tool Vignetting correction tool Local contrast enhancement tool Auto Crop and Fill option in the rotation tool Multi-language support (already included in package: English, German, Hungarian, Latvian, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak) Channel mixer Deconvolution based sharpening VNG-4 interpolation of dcraw to reduce maze on Olympus raw images Selectable guide lines when cropping Enhanced auto and spot white balance Support for new cameras (DCRaw 8.
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Main Features of RT v2.3

Raw Therapee is a free RAW converter and digital photo processing software. Main features : Selectable high performance demosaicing algorithms (EAHD and HPHD and VNG-4). Compare them on this comparison page. Using DCRaw 8.82⁄1.398 for decoding RAW images Image post processing in 16 bit / channel mode Exposure control in RGB space Auto exposure with adjustable clipping point / Exposure compensation / Shadow and highight compression / Contrast adjustment, curve editor White balance adjustment in RGB space With in-camera, automatic and spot white balance options / Temperature/Green tint fine tuning Highlight Recovery Shadows/Highlights control in RGB space Basic Luminance curve tool to modify the luminance channel in CIELab color space Brightness / Contrast adjustment, curve editor USM sharpening applied on the CIELab luminance channel Classical USM parameters (Radius, Amount, Threshold) / Option to avoid noise amplification / Sharpening halo control Optional RL Deconvolution based sharpening for even better sharpening results Color shift control in CIELab color space Allows color shift by shifting the CIELab “a” and “b” channels Color booster applied on the CIELab “a” and “b” channels
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2007

RawTherapee v2.2 released

Changelog: ICC based color management (with selectable input/working/output/monitor profiles) Clipped highlight/shadow indication Reset button for the adjusters Browser shows basic exif data (Last Photo) option in the profile switcher rt.exe can now be called with an image file in command line argument New color scheme, splash screen, icon and home page (thanks, bytec) Fix for the magenta highlights of Olympus cameras Many bug fixes (including file sorting) If you tried one of the beta versions please don’t forget to delete the “options” file (there is one in the .
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RawTherapee v2.1

RawTherapee 2.1 has been released! The main changes are: Tone curve and Luminance Curve editors implemented Sharpening now entails much fewer sharpening halos Improved response to color boost and luminance curve adjustments Much better highlight handling Auto white balance algorithm has been replaced A new (faster) demosaicing algorithm, HPHD, is available and it is now the default Hideable history and file browser panels New cameras are supported: Fuji SuperCCD, D1X and raw files with the Canon hack Thumbnail size in file browser is now adjustable in the Preferences dialog More details about some changes:
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RawTherapee v2.0

The long awaited version 2.0 arrived. It is fast, while the image quality is the same as before. It runs on weaker CPUs and it requires less memory that version 1.1. The main changes are the following: Completely rewritten, blocking-free asynchronous GUI Multi-core processor support Background saving Change history with bookmarks Dual view: full image preview + 100% crop view Highlight recovery tool Chromatic aberration correction tool Furthermore, we have now a forum and – most importantly – a donation page :-)