Lightroom vs RawTherapee

Over the years digital paintings and vector illustrations gained a lot of popularity due to their use in clickable web ads, creating banners, online marketing and advertising etc. Photo editing, manipulation, image management and creation have always been tough tasks for designers so a lot of IT organizations released different photo editing software to ease this task. The two best software for these tasks are RawTherapee and Adobe Lightroom. Both of these softwares are very advanced and provide a large number of robust tools to ease image management and designing tasks.

Adobe Lightroom is an advanced image management software which is used to edit and manipulate images. It can be considered an extension of Photoshop which made image editing much easy. Initially, it was released in 2007 and its stable version was launched in 2022. It has a SaaS license and was developed by Adobe Incorporation.

Advantages of Lightroom

• Image Editing is fast and file data can be preserved using non-destructive mode.
• It comes with inbuilt cataloguing and file management functionality.
• It comes with advanced tools like brush and gradient adjustment along with masking and cloning features.
• It is very easy to learn this software.
• Almost all types of file formats are supported by this software.

Disadvantages of Lightroom

• It is a costly software which requires a monthly or yearly subscription.
• Blending mode and layering management functionality are not given.

RawTherapee is a computer application which is used to process different types of photographs. It contains many image editing tools to perform non-destructive photo editing. Initially, it was released in 2009 and its stable version was launched in 2020. It is available in multiple languages and supports different operating systems like Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It is an open-source software whose source code is available on GitHub.

Advantages of RawTherapee

• It supports different file formats like JPEG, PNG, TIFF etc.
• The installation process and configuration are easy.
• It has a sidecar files facility which allows uploading images fully and partially.
• It comes with RawPedia which provides all the necessary information about this software and tutorials to use it.

Disadvantages of RawTherapee

• It does not support backward compatibility means files made in the newer version cannot be opened in the older version.
• Its interface is not user-friendly.

Following is a table of differences between Adobe Lightroom and RawTherapee:

	Lightroom	RawTherapee
1.	It can be understood as image management software with advanced image editing and manipulation features.	It is a computer application which is used to create, edit and manipulate images.
2.	It is not an open-source software.	It is an open-source software.
3.	It was originally created by Mark Hamburg.	It was originally created by Gabor Horvath.
4.	It was built using C++ and Lua programming language.	It was built using the C++ programming language.
5.	It is a paid software which is available at a subscription basis.	It is free software.
6.	It saves images as XMP catalogue files.	It does not have the functionality to save images as XMP catalogue files.
7.	It has advanced image editing and manipulation features.	It has simple image editing features.
8.	It is licensed as SaaS (Software as a Service).	It uses GPL 3.0 license.