RAWTHERAPEE 5.12 RELEASE NOTES

This is RawTherapee 5.12, released on 2025-05-28.



IN GENERAL

Start by reading the "Getting Started" article on RawPedia:
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/

RawTherapee supports most raw formats, including Pentax and Sony Pixel Shift, Canon Dual-Pixel, and those from Foveon and X-Trans sensors.
If you're wondering whether it supports your camera's raw format, first download RawTherapee and try for yourself. If a raw format is not supported it will either not open, or the preview in the Editor tab will appear black, white, or have a strong color cast - usually magenta. In that case, read the "Adding Support for New Raw Formats" RawPedia article.

In order to use RawTherapee efficiently you should know that:
- You can scroll all panels using the mouse scroll-wheel.
- You can right-click on a tool's name to automatically expand it while collapsing all others.
- To change slider values or drop-down list items with the mouse scroll-wheel, hold the Shift key. This is so that you can safely scroll the panels without accidentally changing a slider or other tool setting.
- All curves support the Shift and Ctrl keys while dragging a point. Shift+drag makes the point snap to a meaningful axis (top, bottom, diagonal, other), while Ctrl+drag makes your mouse movement super-fine for precise point positioning.
- There are many keyboard shortcuts which make working with RawTherapee much faster and give you greater control. Make sure you familiarize yourself with them on RawPedia's "Keyboard Shortcuts" page!
- All sliders support a fine-tuning mode which you can toggle by pressing the Shift key while dragging a slider.



NEW FEATURES SINCE 5.11

- The Raw Black Points has a new option called Dehaze. It sets the black points to the minimum values in the image, which often has the effect of reducing haze.
- Distortion Correction gained a de-fish feature that converts fisheye images into normal (rectilinear) images. It works best with the equidistant fisheye projection. The new Scale adjuster in Lens / Geometry allows manual scaling of the transformed image for when Auto-fill yields unsatisfactory results.
- All images in a Canon RAW burst mode file are accessible. Previously, only the first 6 images were accessible.
- A new tool called Gamut Compression applies the ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) Reference Gamut Compression operator to improve the look of highly-saturated colors and bring colors within a selectable gamut before applying other color-related tools offered by RawTherapee.
- The Resize tool gained a framing feature that adds a decorative solid color border around the image before it is saved. Various sizing options allow great flexibility in adjusting the border thickness and image dimensions. To reflect the tool's capabilities, it has been renamed to Resize & Framing.
- Demosaiced floating-point DNGs are now supported.
- The Abstract Profile tool has a new Contrast Enhancement feature that offers a simple way to add local contrast. It can be used to restore contrast lost due to the application of the abstract profile.
- The Color appearance tool in Selective Editing gained several Tone Mapping Operators (formerly Highlight Attenuation & Levels) enhancements in Source Data Adjustments. The RGB channel Slope tone mapper (formerly Levels) has new options. There is a new Sigmoid based tone mapper.
- More Sony lenses are recognized, improving the data displayed in the quick info overlay and enabling automatic profiled lens correction.
- The Shadows/Highlights & Tone Equalizer tool in Selective Editing gained the Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch (GHS) global tone mapper. To reflect the tool's new tone mapper, it has been renamed to Shadows/Highlights, Equalizer & GHS.
- Added or improved support for cameras, raw formats and color profiles (not an exhaustive list because unconfirmed support is excluded):
    - Canon EOS R8 (DCP, black level in electronic shutter mode)
    - Fujifilm X-E4 (raw crop in electronic shutter mode)
    - Sony ILCE-7CR (pixel shift)
    - Sony ILCE-7M3 (black level)
    - Sony ILME-FX3 (black level when not using LibRaw)



NEWS RELEVANT TO PACKAGE MAINTAINERS

New since 5.11:
- The official repository has been moved to a new GitHub organization called RawTherapee. The repository is now at https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee. Previously, it was at https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee.

In general:
- To get the source code, either clone from git or use the tarball from https://rawtherapee.com/shared/source/. Do not use the auto-generated GitHub release tarballs.
- Requires GTK+ version >= 3.24.3.
- GTK+ versions 3.24.3 - 3.24.6 have an issue where combobox menu scroll-arrows are missing when the combobox list does not fit vertically on the screen. As a result, users would not be able to scroll in the following comboboxes: Processing Profiles, Film Simulation, and the camera and lens profiles in Profiled Lens Correction.
- JPEG XL read support depends on libjxl. By default, RawTherapee builds with JPEG XL support if and only if libjxl is present. Use -DWITH_JXL="ON" or DWITH_JXL="OFF" to explicitly enable or disable, respectively, JPEG XL support.
- RawTherapee builds with a custom version of LibRaw by default. To use the system LibRaw, use -DWITH_SYSTEM_LIBRAW="ON". Requires LibRaw >= 0.21.
- RawTherapee 5 requires GCC-4.9 or higher, or Clang.
- Do not use -ffast-math, it will not make RawTherapee faster but will introduce artifacts.
- Use -O3, it will make RawTherapee faster with no known side-effects.
- For stable releases use -DCACHE_NAME_SUFFIX=""
- For development builds and release-candidates use -DCACHE_NAME_SUFFIX="5-dev"



NEWS RELEVANT TO DEVELOPERS

See CONTRIBUTING.md



DOCUMENTATION

https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/



REPORTING BUGS

If you found a problem, don't keep it to yourself. Read the "How to write useful bug reports" article to get the problem fixed:
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/How_to_write_useful_bug_reports



FORUM

RawTherapee shares a forum with users and developers of other Free/Libre/Open Source Software:
https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/rawtherapee



REVISION HISTORY

The complete changelog is available at:
https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee/commits/
