What is the best free RAW editor/converter on Windows?

Question

I'm looking for a free RAW editor/converter on Windows. Can you tell me some strong/weak points of them comparing with Capture NX and/or Adobe Photoshop Elements?

• RawTherapee
• PhotoFiltre
• Able RAWer
• Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 - conversion & EXIF
• FixNEF - white balance
• RAWShooter Essentials 2006 - registration not possible anymore

EXIF editing would be a nice bonus.

Related:

• Nikon RAW image processing in non-Nikon software
• Adding data to an EXIF file
• Please suggest a workflow on Mac using only free/open source software

Asked by n/a

Answer

As I mentioned in my comment above, the camera manufacturer can sometimes offer an excellent RAW->JPG convertor. One reason to use the manufacturer's software is that no one else knows better how to interpret the RAW information. All the light and lens-specific data especially can be quite tricky to fully interpret and post-process.

In the Nikon world, there's ViewNX, which ships for free with the DSLRs and is also downloadable for free here. It's excellent for first-pass editing of photos, including Exposure, White Balance, Sharpness, Contrast, Brightness, Highlight and Shadow Protection (very impressive), Color Booster, D-Lighting HS, and Axial Color Aberration. You can also do all your Metadata edits here.

Of course, it's not as full-featured as their expensive, and terribly slow pay version: CaptureNX. And also not surprisingly, Nikon inhibits you from one very basic editing option in ViewNX, which is photo cropping (with the hopes that you'll buy CaptureNX just to be able to crop?). So sometimes I'll do my first pass of major edits in ViewNX, convert to RAW in ViewNX, and then crop the JPG in Picasa. Cumbersome, but free and still very high quality.

I'm sure Canon probably offers something similar.

Answered by n/a

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