raw processing freeware - advice?
I am an adobe user, but soon I will teach a photo class for my teenie kids and since they can't afford lightroom and photoshop I am now looking for a good freeware alternative running on mac AND pc. I tried RawTherapee but to be honest, it looks very complicated to me, I can't get the results I would like and it is not self-explaining at all :-( and it looks horribly fuzzy on a retina screen! LightZone looks a bit better on the first glance. First of all I want to do color and light adjustments on the whole pics, retouching and masking is not so important, but would be nice to have. What do you guys use and recommend?
jazzie Thanks, but it seems that it is not really free, or just until the end of november...?
Arkadiusz Bała You need to get the license from this site before the end of November and then you can use to software freely. However, word of caution: while DOP is a great software which allows to get a lot of details from RAW files, it can be a bit unintuitive, so it may not be the best option for begginers.
jazzie Thank you. At the first glance it looks like (too) much AI to me, but I will check it out. For the school project it is still too expensive, I can not force the kids to spend 69€.
Arkadiusz Bała cyberlink.com/stat/edms/Giveaw...
Cyberlink offers a free version of Photodirector 5. While it doesn't support RAW files from some newer cameras, it's a great piece of software that looks and feels a lot like Lightroom and is pretty easy to use.
If needed, newer editions also come cheaply compared to other photo-editing software (e.g. few days ago I got Photodirector 8 Ultra for something like 35$).
Paweł Kadysz Polarr is free and supports RAW processing. I know @Magda uses it and I recently recommended it to @ultraviolet so maybe they can say if polarr is good or not?
Oh, the link: polarr.co
Viola Kuniej yes, I love it! I'm very satisfied!
Phillip Flores Having a look at it. I currently use Luminar and very happy with it.
Magda Korzewska I am not very experienced in post processing but polarr I have learnt so quickly. With desktop version you have much more functionality than with online version. A lot of presets but also many functions to make it on your own. One remark, it has bug when exporting photo, you loose date of photo. Tookapic recognizes it as a time bending.
Phillip Flores I was playing around with Polarr last night and I had an unusual error. I launched Polarr but before opening a photo I removed the thumbnails found at the bottom of the screen and then I proceeded to open a photo. Nothing happened. The photo did not load but it appeared in the thumbnails area. I can also open another photo with the same result. Anyone encountered this error?
Abderrahim Darktable
Tomek Zimnocho I'm using digiKam. It needs some play in settings at the beginning, but can give some results in return. Rather difficult and not so user friendly, but free, stable and usable on lower specs PCs
jazzie
Thanks everybody for your answers! I compared lightzone, polarr, rawtherapee and lightroom processing the same image with every software. the result of lightroom looks much better than the others. I really miss the slider 'clarity' and the ability to process lights and shadows well. Probably it is also because I am used to lightroom and know exactly how to get which result...
I got the second best results with polarr, which I like because it is quite easy to handle.
Ian Prince VSCO on iOS for me for the last two years. Handles RAWs for those rare times that I don't shoot JPEG. I'll have to give Polarr a try too sometime.
Daniel Zaleski DPReview just published a news on new (for windows) free raw processing tool - Darktable. dpreview.com/news/2776812471/f...
gerlos I'd suggest Polarr desktop apps (they work anywhere: Linux, Windows, MacOS - mobile and online versions doesn't seem to support RAW). You need to pay (a small fee, actually) only to use preset collections, but usual color grading tools are available in the free edition. Moreover, there are online and mobile versions of the app that look and feel the same of the desktop apps, even if they can't work on RAW file.
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