Adobe vs RawTherapee — A First Look, An Honest Take
Aligning building edges in RawTherapee: Select the straight line tool, manually adjust vertical perspective, tweak distortion parameters, fine-tune rotation. Time invested: several minutes of careful adjustment.
Aligning the same buildings in Lightroom: Click Upright – Vertical. Done. Perfectly aligned in one click.
That’s the difference between these programs in a single moment—and after six months with RawTherapee and one week with Lightroom, I’ve found dozens more just like it.
Is Adobe’s automated efficiency worth the subscription cost for casual creators? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with since purchasing my Nikon Z6 III last June and diving into serious photo editing.
Here’s my honest take as someone who has spent years avoiding Adobe’s price tag: RawTherapee demands more from you but teaches you more in return. Lightroom removes friction but also removes some of the learning. Neither approach is wrong—but one might be right for you.
Let me show you what I mean.
A quick bit of context
I first learned Adobe and Corel tools in school—back when HTML was typed directly into Notepad. Once school ended, so did my access. Subscription pricing quickly put Adobe out of reach, and I shifted to open-source and low-cost alternatives: GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, and eventually Canva. I briefly revisited older Photoshop CS versions, but when everything moved to the cloud, I let it go.
Fast forward to now. Photography pulled me back into the editing world, and I went looking for a true Lightroom-style competitor. That search led me to RawTherapee.
Over the last six months, I’ve become a genuine fan. I’ve built a growing library of custom profiles—tuned slowly and intentionally—and developed a workflow that feels both powerful and precise.
At the same time, Adobe has been making headlines with seriously impressive advancements. As a freelancer with experience in commercial publishing, graphic design, and a growing focus on photography, it felt worth revisiting the question with fresh eyes.
The image
This photo was taken on a cold November evening in downtown Edmonton, overlooking the river valley. I love urban night photography, and this scene immediately gave me Gotham vibes.
Technically, I shoot in aperture priority with a neutral profile—keeping ISO as low as possible while preserving detail to shape later in post.
RawTherapee — workflow and impressions
These edits reflect several months of refinement—slowly building a custom look that fits my style. The goal here wasn’t speed; it was control.
RawTherapee is an advanced editor, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. If you’re brand new to photo editing, this likely isn’t where you should start. That said, I came in with past Photoshop experience and was specifically looking for a Lightroom competitor—not a Photoshop replacement.
After working through tutorials (and, admittedly, choosing the “hard way”), I was struck by just how powerful this free, open-source tool is. It took a few sessions to feel comfortable, but my images began improving almost immediately.
RawTherapee offers some of the most granular control I’ve seen, even for non-RAW files. What it lacks is hand-holding or AI assistance—something that’s increasingly common in commercial software.
Once an image is selected, the main editing panels include:
- Exposure
- Detail
- Colour
- Advanced
- Selective Editing
- Transform
For this image, I primarily worked within Exposure, Detail, Colour, and Transform.
Because this image was destined for Instagram, I started with Transform—cropping and geometry. I aligned building edges using the Select Straight Line tool, adjusted vertical perspective, and subtly tweaked distortion to pull the viewer’s eye inward.
From there, it was all about mood.
In Exposure, I slightly lowered overall exposure, lifted blacks, reduced brightness and saturation, then moved into a flexible tone curve—key to achieving the dramatic, almost acidic feel. I refined shadows and highlights, applied a diagonal gradient filter, added a strong vignette, and further adjusted lightness, contrast, and chromaticity in the L*A*B* panel.
Under Detail, I leaned into local contrast and dehaze to emphasize texture. Finally, in Colour, I enabled colour toning and pushed the slope and power toward cooler blue-green hues.
The total edit time for this image was roughly 60-90 minutes.
For total transparency I’ve included a screencap of some of the image settings if you’d like to try and recreate my edits.
Recreating the look in Lightroom
When I opened Lightroom, I’d only used it a couple of times before. After RawTherapee’s deep menu structure, Lightroom felt immediately more streamlined—almost understated at first glance.
The primary tools are clearly laid out: presets, editing, crop/geometry, and masking. My initial impression was that editing felt more direct and approachable, but the power was a little scaled down from what I was used to.
I followed the same workflow: starting with Crop and Geometry. This time, I selected Upright – Vertical and immediately got a near-perfect alignment. A small manual rotation followed—partly refinement, partly pride.
From there, I moved into manual adjustments rather than presets—working through exposure, tone curves, colour, and detail. Achieving the same dramatic feel required careful curve work and contrast tuning, followed by subtle colour grading to reintroduce the blue-green tones.
Then I tested the Denoise tool.
And honestly—wow.
I applied it at the default 50 percent setting and immediately understood why professionals praise it so highly. The results were impressive without feeling artificial.
To finish, I used masking to fine-tune brightness in specific areas—keeping restraint in mind. The object selection was so intuitive it genuinely made me laugh.
At that point, I called the edit done. While I wasn’t timing myself, the process felt noticeably faster.
The verdict (for now)
Original Image Unedited
Edited with Raw Therapee
Edited with Lightroom
I wasn’t aiming for a pixel-perfect match—but I did want to get close. And I did.
RawTherapee still offers incredible depth and control, especially for intermediate users who enjoy understanding why an image looks the way it does. It’s powerful, flexible, and completely free—provided you’re willing to invest time and curiosity.
Lightroom, meanwhile, delivers a smoother user experience and impressively capable AI-assisted tools. While I felt slightly less granular control, I reached similar results more quickly—and that matters.
For now, RawTherapee remains my primary tool, especially when not needing RAW level power. However, Lightroom has earned a place on my radar.
Next, I’ll be diving deeper into Lightroom’s masking and object selection tools—that’s where things genuinely surprised me.
Which edit do you prefer? I’d love to hear why.
By Anne Marie Harding
Published January 16, 2026