RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor

No an expert here but RAW is the data generated by the sensor and requires some heavy processing before you can show it on screen. A bitmap is an image format (assuming you mean the BMP files).

I'm not the person you're responding to, but in my hobby experience it's sometimes the difference between a photo being fine or even great, and being completely unusable.

If the white balance is set wrong in-camera, then the JPG just came out all blue. It's effectively a black and white photo (albeit in shades of blue), and there's nothing to be done about it. Shot in RAW, the photo can be made color again, extremely easily and quickly.

In fact it gets worse, not better, if you on the day try to adjust the white balance, as you go from outdoors to indoors. Not to mention if you change from flash and back. Auto is safer, but when it's wrong, the photo is unusable, and the moment is gone.

But my DSLR is now over a decade old. Maybe "auto" has gotten much better?

So yeah, for me the main thing is to be able to post facto adjust white balance, which JPG does not support. (if you've done it with both JPG and RAW, you know what I mean when I say "does not support")

It's not about not "feeling right at home". I've detailed this in other comments but it's just that DT has an abysmal interface and that the devs insist that it needs to be complex. This sort of hostile attitude is part of what spawned Ansel.

  I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.

This is a bit of a myth.

One of my complaints dealt with how unintuitive the sliders are. There's no additional control gained by making the UI widgets difficult to deal with.

Another dealt with trying to set color temperature. There are two places color temperature can be set and they'll both conflict with each other. The newer module is absurdly complex. It's great if you're writing a dissertation on color rendition but less great if you're trying to be productive.

Sure there's more control offered by having ten different demosaicing algorithms to choose from. Unfortunately I can't think of a time when I've needed or wanted that control. Maybe if I shot Fuji or Sigma. But I don't. And most folks don't.

Presets and history are a nightmare. Items in the history widget get aggregated so it's difficult/impossible to pick out individual steps. If you give labels to the actions in a preset (my terminology is off because I've not used DT much in a while)… sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't and things don't appear to pick up the label/group/whatever it's called. If memory serves I had to apply presets in one module to have them visible in the develop module.

The vestigial DAM stuff… ugh.

There's no obvious A/B split views.

Perhaps the most obnoxious thing is that DT shamelessly apes the Lightroom interface but in reality behaves almost nothing like Lightroom. There's a TON of complexity for little-if-any improvement in outcomes.

First, let me concur that Darktable is not great. I found it to be neither quite as simple as Lightroom, nor as powerful as RawTherapee, and severely lacking in documentation.

> Another dealt with trying to set color temperature. There are two places color temperature can be set and they'll both conflict with each other.

There are at least three colour temperature / white balance controls in RT; more if you count output colour space primaries, Lab space curve, etc. as ways of creative white balance control.

I’m not sure I see any particular conflict between them. They all do different things; some of them are more relevant if you want to achieve the most precise representation (e.g., you are digitizing analog prints or paintings), others are more relevant if you are going for a creative look of your own.

It’s probably best to consult RawPedia[0], but as far as I understand:

— One of them controls raw data interpretation, and affects how different tools work down the line (e.g., highlight recovery or targeting sky with wavelets). As far as I understand, you probably want to keep this one technically correct and as close as possible to the true neutral white/grey point; at this step you are helping the tool do the rest of its job and not trying to achieve a look. If you use a colour card, a DCP profile, etc., then you know exactly what to set White Balance controls to.

— There are a couple of controls under CAM model, which you may or may not be using depending on your profile. With scene illuminant you set… well, scene illuminant (the light you have in your scene), and viewing conditions allow you to shift colours to make it look right if you know your photo will be viewed in an environment with particular light.

— Then, of course, you have dozens of different ways of creatively controlling perceived white balance via different curves or CLUT; I think these are most handy if you are going for a look.

[0] https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/White_Balance

I try to daily drive Linux but can't find a simple / nice to use RAW editor. I had high hopes for Darktable but I was astonished how bad the GUI is. When trying to delete photo, it deletes the photo under the pointer, not the photo I selected... WTF ?!? And the whole app feels so complicated... Then there's forks emerging and the dev forces are diluted in multiples applications and Adobe continues to milk its users because Open Source dev can't work together. Between Shotwell, Gthumb, Loupe, RT, DigiKam, and more... Imagine if all this efforts was done in one cohesive app ? Ok I stop dreaming.