The most significant change in RawTherapee is to be found in the licensing terms however, with the program now available under the GPL open source license. Developer Gábor Horváth intends to continue his work on the program, but has decided a switch to the open-source licensing will allow him to better manage his time and focus on development areas that are of personal interest, while third parties can contribute to RawTherapee's future. As new developers join the project, end users should hopefully find the licensing change translates to the squashing of more bugs, and a faster development process.

As for the changes in RawTherapee v3.0 Alpha 1, these are as follows (quoting the RawTherapee website):

• Multi-tab interface

• Real batch processing support arrived: select multiple images and adjust them together (the multi-adjust behavior of some parameters is selectable in the preferences dialog: they can be either additive or absolute)

• Completely re-written editor: preview and detail view are now gone. The main image view can be magnified as required, and only the necessary part of the image will be re-calculated. There is a small navigator, too, and infinitely many detailed views can be opened to investigate fine details.

• 16 bit thumbnails (an option, takes double disk space)

• Before / after view in the editor

• The behavior of the exposure controls changed. The "exposure" parameter is what was called "brightness" in previous versions. The "brightness" parameter is now a real brightness control, that shifts the histogram (of course with highlight/shadow protection)

RawTherapee is available free of charge for both Windows and Linux operating systems. More details can be found on the RawTherapee website.