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Last updated on January 6th, 2022

For a long time, photographers only had a few options for photo editing software. Adobe Photoshop was known as the go-to photo editing software on the market. However, it had too many features, which made it challenging for its users. Most users don’t need to do several edits to their photos, while some need to do a few tweaks.

Choosing the appropriate photo editing software can be confusing as there are so many available. Right now, one of the most popular photo editing software is Lightroom. Another software is RawTherapee.

In this article, we will be discussing RawTherapee vs Lightroom. We will be looking into some of the unique features of these software. Let’s start.

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What is Lightroom?

Lightroom is one of the few photo editors that professional photographers recommend because it’s user-friendly. Adobe Lightroom allows you to manage all your photos, edit them, and then export them. 

It’s perfect even for simple photo editing, having features like cropping, gradient control, exposure, saturation, and many more. If you have just taken an interest in photography, these features will be of big help to you. On the other hand, if you’re a professional photographer with years of experience in the field, Lightroom offers several advanced features that will surely bring delight to your needs. 

Lightroom is a non-destructive photo editing software, which means there is no such thing as a “save as” button. Whenever you edit a photo in Lightroom, it gets saved within the Lightroom Catalog, which is somewhat like a storage/bucket for all your edits.

Lightroom Classic Library Module
Lightroom Classic Library

Adobe Lightroom Main Features

Lightroom comes with so many features it’s impossible to cover everything in one article. However, the following sub-sections are some of its most highlighted features. 

Managing Photos

The first thing that you can do with Lightroom is to arrange and organize your photos. Whenever you place or import an image into Lightroom, you can see its location on your computer, which you can find on the left side of your screen.

However, photos that are on your computer don’t immediately appear in Lightroom. If you like to add photos or videos in Lightroom, you will need to import them. 

In Lightroom, there are several ways to organize your photos. You could take note of it by giving it a star rating or adding them to a collection or folder.

Editing Photos

After importing your photos in Lightroom, you can now edit them however you like. Lightroom’s editing options include all the necessary things for your photos: brightness, exposure, highlights, saturation, and many more.

Luckily, it also lets you do local edits, which means only editing a specific part in a photo, and the rest of it unchanged. With this, Lightroom is a great tool to use for your post-processing needs.

Lightroom Classic Develop Module screenshot
Lightroom Classic Develop Module

Exporting Photos

Once you’re satisfied with your edits to your photos, you can now save them through exporting. When you go on a trip, you will take several photos to serve as a memory.

However, when you try to send it to your friends, certain apps have a file size limit. Sending photos that are not in full resolution may lower the quality, or it may become pixelated. One of the solutions to this is to shrink the file size of the particular photo.

With Lightroom, resizing photos is easy as it allows you to export your photos at whatever setting you prefer. It’s important to remember that exporting doesn’t mean deleting or overwriting the original photo. With a few clicks, you can export your photos in no time at all.

Creating Presets To Save Time

Presets allow you to save all your changes on the adjustment sliders in the Develop module. With these, you can then apply these presets to your other photos with just a click. These presets can help you develop and enhance your editing style. Having your own presets can give your edited photos a consistent look.

Download my free Lightroom Presets for Instagram.

Lightroom Classic presets screenshot

Batch Processing Images with the Quick Develop Panel

With the Quick Develop panel, you can choose multiple photos and apply your own presets to these. If you need to adjust the brightness of several photos at once, you can quickly select these photos and edit them appropriately. Batch processing helps you save time when you need to make final tweaks in your edited photos.

Intuitive User Interface

The good thing with Lightroom is its user-friendly user interface. When editing, you can see all the adjustment tools in the Develop module. 

Transferring Adjustment Settings From One Image To Another Image

Should you want to copy the same adjustments from one photo to another, you can use the Previous feature in the Develop module, which lets you copy the adjustment settings to another image. 

Non-Destructive Editing To Protect Original Files

With Lightroom, there is no need to worry about damaging the original file of your photo. Whenever you make new adjustments to an image, Lightroom stores them in the catalog file and shows how to export this. 

Fantastic RAW File Editor

Adobe Lightroom is an excellent tool for editing RAW files. RAW format is the setting on most DSLR cameras with the highest quality, and you can fully utilize Lightroom for it. Since the image is uncompressed, you will not sacrifice detail when editing the image.

Easily Crop Images

The crop tool makes it easy to crop your photos to any size you wish. Along with the crop tool, Lightroom also has a straighten tool. By clicking and dragging a line along your image, it will immediately be straightened and cropped.

Creative Adjustment Tools

Lightroom comes with several creative adjustment tools. Some of them are as follows:

  • Adjustment Brush – If you only want to apply adjustments to certain parts of an image, you can use this tool. It can be a big help if you are working on tiny portions of an image.
  • Graduated Filter – This filter applies a gradient-type effect to your photos.
  • Post-Crop Vignette – This tool helps make natural-looking vignettes to attract the center part of the photo. Also, you can use this tool to help you remove vignettes produced by the camera lens.

Lightroom allows photographers to get creative and think outside the box. It can also help you in finishing things quickly as photo editing can sometimes be quite time-consuming.

Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC

Photographers can use the original Lightroom, now the Lightroom Classic CC, or the cloud-based Lightroom CC. You may ask yourself, what is the difference between these two? Let’s find out.

The Lightroom Classic CC still contains the same photo editing software, which still runs on desktop systems. On the other hand, the Lightroom CC is compatible with any device you are currently using, storing your photos into a cloud server. Although both of these share similar features, some tools are not available in the other program.

As Adobe continues to enhance both programs, the difference between the two narrows. If you will likely edit on your laptop or desktop, the Lightroom Classic CC would be the better pick. However, if you will periodically be editing with a mobile device or on the cloud, you can opt for Lightroom CC.

new Lightroom CC cloud-based screenshot
New Lightroom CC (cloud-based)

What is RawTherapee?

RawTherapee is a photography software that rivals Lightroom. It’s free for everyone, with no need for any registration or sign-ups. Free software may seem enticing to people saving up on costs or those who are starting photography. Like Lightroom, this software also allows its users to work with RAW files in a non-destructive way.

There are many things that you can do with RawTherapee. It does imitate the interface of Lightroom in several ways, but it focuses more on color correction. The Color section located in the Editor tab provides numerous options to help users color correct their photos. Aside from this feature, RawTherapee also has several options for your RAW files. A few examples would be pattern noise and chromatic aberration correction.

You can do batch editing within the File Browser tab, which lets you save a lot of time. The batch editing section is easily accessible in the right column in the File Browser tab.

This photo editing software provides many options in its Export tab, which you can find in the right column within the File Browser tab. Aside from exporting images here, it lets you select which edits to exclude from the exporting process. Images that are in the queue will appear in the Queue tab.

See the RawTherapee review for more info.

RawTherapee screenshot
RawTherapee

RawTherapee vs Lightroom: Which is Better?

If you are still wondering which software to pick for your photo editing needs, this section takes it a step further in comparing their differences and similarities.

Interface

Lightroom showcases a refreshing and clean interface. At first glance, Lightroom appears sleek and straightforward. As you navigate through it, you can find the more complex features. 

The interface contains four buttons along the left rail: the plus button, Home, My Photos, and Sharing, which you use for adding new photos, showing photo thumbnails, editing images, and sharing them, respectively.

Sometimes, Lightroom is a bit scattered. When you are on one panel and wish to open another, the current one closes by default. However, you can change this behavior in preferences. The help feature is an excellent tool for beginners. By clicking the question mark on the top-right, it displays several helpful tips in using Lightroom.

RawTherapee’s interface, however, is similar to other photo-editing software. It has a dark appearance to give undivided focus on the picture you are editing. Compared to Lightroom, RawTherapee’s interface is not as user-friendly. The file browser button, editor button, queue button, to name a few, are not positioned efficiently.

The main working areas of this software are the File Browser, Editor, and Queue. The selected photo is in the middle, thumbnails of other photos on the left, and some tools on the right.

The interface of RawTherapee is easy to understand, but if you have been using Lightroom, it may take some time to adjust to new software.

Image Management

Lightroom allows you to organize your photos using albums, star ratings, and pick and reject flags. You can also add keywords for quick and easy searching. When importing images into Lightroom, the software immediately arranges them into folders.

In RawTherapee, the file browser is in charge of image management. This software is dependent on how you arrange your images in your system. With that said, you will have to order your photos before importing them to RawTherapee. Opening several folders in RawTherapee is not allowed, so you will have to search for your photos by clicking every folder until you find it.

The image management of RawTherapee is not as flexible as Lightroom because there are still many things that RawTherapee can improve on.

Image Editing

In Lightroom, you get the usual image adjustment settings: Exposure, Shadows, Contrast, Brightness, Highlights, and many more.

Lightroom allows you to apply filter effects by using the presets at the bottom-left of the software. The crop tool provides users with a preset aspect ratio. The Adjustment Brush, Healing Brush, and Linear and Radial Gradients tools are also available in Lightroom. You can use these tools to make local adjustments to a specific part of a photo.

On the other hand, RawTherapee has a toolbar with eight preview modes, four background colors, three RGB channels, and luminance. These help in customizing image previews.

It has an exposure section in the editor tab. To undo all your changes, you can click the reset button. If you want the software to decide the adjustments, you can use the auto levels. If you opt to do automatic editing, the software offers 32 filters for this. Also, you can create and save your filters.

The detail section focuses on noise reduction and sharpening your images. Lastly, the color section is in charge of adjusting vibrance and white balance.

Soft Proofing/Exporting

By exporting, you may choose to keep the original file type of your photo or opt for JPEG. Other file types are also available. When exporting photos with Lightroom, it produces a file that stores all your adjustments. It also allows you to rename your images, place them wherever and do the same thing with just one click.

For RawTherapee, you will need to go to the Queue tab. Once you click the export button, the photos will move to the Queue tab. When exporting images, RawTherapee has the option to choose the edit types to exclude. Also, RawTherapee lets you do soft proofing, giving you a preview of how your photos would look in print.

Performance

Lightroom can use a graphics processer for your photo adjustments. Having a decent PC should help you when you are working on your photo editing with Lightroom. There have been significant improvements in the import speed of Lightroom Classic, making it better than the competition. 

Using a 32-bit processing engine, modern algorithms, and advanced color and detail editing, RawTherapee provides users with high image quality for RAW files. It also provides outstanding RAW support, giving users the best-in-class demosaicing, compositing pixel-shift raw files, and many more.

Plugins Available To Lightroom And Other Compatible Photography Software

Lightroom supports plugins, and luckily there are a lot of fantastic plugins available to help fellow photographers. With a quick Google search, you can find plugins that may address your needs, including some of the best hdr software plugins.

Several Free and Premium Presets Available on LR

For Lightroom, there are a lot of presets that are available for users. Presets are settings or filters that allow adjustments to the look of an image. Some filters are available for free, while others are not. Lightroom has a library of presets created by other users. 

Available Mobile Apps for Lightroom

If you are always on the go, having a photo editor in the palm of your hands is a huge advantage. For mobile devices, Lightroom CC is available on Android and iOS. The cloud allows your photos to sync to all your devices. Changes you make will also sync across all devices, making it possible to work almost anywhere.

Conclusion

RawTherapee and Lightroom are both powerful and promising photo editing applications. They provide a handful of features for their users. Lightroom is full of tools that would make photos look beautiful. Users can work more efficiently, reducing the time it typically needs to finish their work.

RawTherapee provides several tools as well, and it’s also free. Although it’s a bit more confusing than Lightroom, it offers several features other free applications do not. Ultimately, it all depends on the user’s preference.

Here are a few questions you may want to ask yourself when choosing between RawTherapee and Lightroom.

  • Are you willing to pay a monthly/annual fee, or would you like to stick to free software?
  • Would you stick to one software, or would you like to explore both?
  • Is either of the two software enough for your photo editing needs?
  • Will you be working on the go?

Verdict: In our opinion, Lightroom is a far more superior photography software than RawTherapee.

Aperlust
About the Author: Aperlust

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