Adobe Lightroom vs RawTherapee

Lightroom is Adobe’s cloud-based service for creating, editing, organizing, storing, and sharing photos across devices. Its photo libraries are searchable, and the editing toolkit includes RAW support, batch editing, masking, AI retouching, AI Lens Blur, Adaptive Presets, portrait Quick Actions, and sensor Dust Removal. Generative Remove uses Adobe Firefly to remove distractions, while Assisted Culling helps sort photos by image quality and group similar shots. Generative upscale with Topaz Gigapixel can enlarge images by up to 4x. Users can collaborate in shared albums, post to social network apps, or share with the Lightroom community. Lightroom is available on Android, iOS, macOS, web, and Windows, with a free mobile app and premium features available as an upgrade. Adobe offers a free plan and a 7-day trial; billing begins when the trial ends, with a further 14-day refund period described. Named plans include Lightroom, Photography, and Creative Cloud Pro, as well as student, teacher, and team options.

RawTherapee is a free desktop program for developing raw images on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its non-destructive, 32-bit floating-point engine handles raw files from many digital cameras, including HDR DNG, as well as JPEG, TIFF, and PNG images. Photographers can control demosaicing and development with multiple algorithms, use masking tools, and batch process images. Editing parameters can be copied or pasted across files, and the program can also be used from a command line. RawTherapee can open raw images from GIMP as a plugin and return edited images there, or send processed images to GIMP or another editor. It is libre software under the GNU General Public License version 3, with RawPedia documentation and a community forum for help. The project says it does not include digital asset management, printing, or uploading features. The macOS 5.13 build has different minimum system requirements for Apple Silicon and Intel, and must be installed in /Applications to start.