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I'm interested in efficient processing of RAW photos on Linux. I've played with RAW a little, but so far I've always reverted back to JPG as I can't be bothered to spend hours doing post-processing. But if I could find a pretty quick way of tweaking RAW photos then I might try again.

There are many tools for working with RAW files in Linux, but which of them let you do things like:

  • correct the white balance on one photo and then apply that to a whole set of photos?
  • have a process of a couple of clicks per photo in some application?

or is RAW post-processing simply not worth doing if you don't take the time to process each photo individually?

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7 Answers 7

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May I suggest RawStudio? It has support for batch operations of the type you're asking for, and has dramatically simplified my post-processing workflow over my old approach of ufraw + GIMP. If you're familiar with similar "workflow" products on other platforms, the UI should feel pretty comfortable.

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DCRaw is the de facto standard for dealing with RAW photos on Linux -- in fact, DCRaw is the basis for the RAW handling in some commercial applications

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    \$\begingroup\$ Can you provide a link for DCRaw being used in Photoshop? I'm skeptical. \$\endgroup\$
    – Reid
    Jul 16, 2010 at 15:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Reid From the link already there "They can call dcraw from a graphical interface, paste pieces of dcraw.c into their code, or just use dcraw.c as the documentation that camera makers refuse to provide: " \$\endgroup\$ Jul 16, 2010 at 15:41
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Reid I also believe the "about box" also references DCRaw, although I'm away from a machine with PS installed at present \$\endgroup\$ Jul 16, 2010 at 15:42
  • \$\begingroup\$ You have a good answer, just delete the Photoshop part. \$\endgroup\$
    – Karel
    Jul 16, 2010 at 16:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ dcraw is a good RAW --> TIFF converter on the command line, but it does not provide what the questioner requested. \$\endgroup\$ May 31, 2014 at 7:55
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UFRaw also provides a batch processing command - just open the first image, apply your settings, then save those with the option "Create ID File" set to "only". Then you can use ufraw-batch to apply the settings from this .ufraw file to your images.

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I recommend darktable. It has the features you need, plus some more. It is not overwhelming though. I like it, because the original photos are not modified. A recipe file with the postprocessing instruction is stored instead.

You will need decent amount of memory (8GB+).

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RawTherapee is available for download for different Linux platforms. If your platform doesn't have binaries for download, you can download the source code and build it yourself. It's open source

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An amazing piece of software that is able of batch-processing RAWs (amongst many other things) is http://www.digikam.org/

Digikam allows not only to manage your photos, but also to (batch) edit them. Its feature page is huge and impressive: http://www.digikam.org/drupal/about?q=about/features

I've been using Digikam for years, since 0.8, and I love the fact that all your workflow is integrated in one application.

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[Bibble Pro][1] is a commercial application, but it allows you to copy settings from one image to another. It also has a very advanced batch processing mode that simplifies the process of exporting a large number of RAW files to JPEG, TIFF or any other format that Bibble supports.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Bibble was bought by Corel and is now being sold as AfterShot Pro. \$\endgroup\$
    – Blrfl
    Oct 4, 2012 at 20:42

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