My New Favorite Tool: Raw Therapee

I am putting together another adventure video after almost a year of not making one. I have gone back and looked at my previous 3 videos and tried to figure out how to make them better. One way is to improve the quality of the photos and so I looked into doing some photo editing.

My daughter-in-law is a professional photographer and uses Adobe Lightroom to edit her photos. I wanted to find a free alternative and my son turned me onto Raw Therapee. I loaded it up onto my computer and started playing around with it. First I watched a tutorial on YouTube to see what the tool can do. Next I tried some of the things of I saw in the tutorial on a photo of my wife. I liked the outcome and so I edited a sunset photo from my most recent adventure trip. I didn't see much of a difference between my edits and the original and so I asked my wife and daughter to come see them. I put both images on the screen next to each other and asked which one they liked best. Both could see a huge difference between the photos. That convinced me to run all of my photos through Raw Therapee. Furthermore, my daughter pointed out what I had done and what made one image better than the other. It impressed me that she knew what I had done and proved to me that little adjustments do make a huge difference.

My only complaint with Raw Therapee is that I thought I was closer to getting the video created. Now I have to run 35 photos through the tool and see how I can make each one better. My hope is that I will be able to get quick enough with the program that I only need to spend a minute or two on each picture. Yes the first couple will take more time than that, but spending an extra hour on this project will be worth it.

If you take a lot of pictures that you want to share with others, I highly recommend downloading Raw Therapee and playing with it. Be sure to go through a quick tutorial as it is a powerful tool and you might not understand everything it can do for you. The tutorial I have linked above is only about 10-minutes long and goes through a lot very quickly. Now I hope my next adventure video shows some improvement over my previous ones.