These days most digital SLR cameras include the ability to shoot in RAW, an uncompressed image format that gives you great control over a number of photographic variables. This can vary from the basics like white balance and exposure; to curve adjustment, lens vignetting and more.

As a semi-serious photographer and Linux user, you'll be forgiven for feeling a bit left out when it comes to post-processing. Whilst Adobe Photoshop (and fantastic Camera RAW module) happily chugs along in Windows or Mac OS, unless you're prepared to put up with WINE you'll be looking for something a little more native.

Here are 4 free solutions for getting the most out of your photography on a Linux machine.

A Quick Word About RAW

If you've bought a digital SLR camera in the last 5 years or so, there's a good chance it can capture photos in the RAW image format. Depending on the size of your camera's sensor, these files can be roughly two to three times the size of your average high quality JPEG.

Whilst it is possible to open JPEG files in some RAW editors, the compression and lack of data stored within a JPEG simply does not compare it to RAW. If your camera does shoot RAW and you haven't experimented yet then I'd urge you to give it a go.

Once you've transferred your RAWs to your computer, you'll need an editor. With an editor you can change (within reason) most aspects of your photographs in a way JPEG doesn't allow. Speaking from experience, it's amazing how well some of your worst shots scrub up after a 10 minute edit!

Note: Where possible, Ubuntu instructions for installing via repositories have been provided.

Photivo

An incredibly powerful RAW editor, Photivo handles nearly every RAW format and BMP files with startling ease. The interface could do with some work, but with literally hundreds of processing techniques at your disposal it's clear that the open-source project is being taken in the right direction.

If you're a fan of GIMP for your photo editing (and let's face it, using Linux you don't exactly have a choice) then you'll also like the way Photivo is able to send modified photos directly to GIMP for retouching, with correct EXIF data and colour profiles.

The developers claim that Photivo uses the most advanced image manipulation algorithms available, though this powerful and complex tool is geared more towards power users and those with prior RAW experience, rather than complete newbies.

Ubuntu install, in Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dhor/myway

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install photivo

Raw Therapee

Not the most intuitive program to use at first, Raw Therapee is a fairly feature rich and comprehensive RAW editor that's compatible with Linux. At the time of writing, the team are working on a stable release of version 3.0, which is a major release for the project.

Due to this, the team are keen to hear from anyone who uses the software and encounters bugs and such. The forum is a great place to start, you can report bugs, learn about current and upcoming features and find detailed discussions about compiling Raw Therapee from source.

There are also versions of the application for Windows and Mac OS X, for those interested.

Rawstudio

Rawstudio offers a decent amount of control over your RAW photographs and supports a wide number of filetypes. Using the sliders it is easy to alter exposure, curves and so on, as well as colour management thanks to Little CMS.

You can convert your RAWs to JPEG, PNG and TIFF image formats, and what's more you can batch process a whole collection of images in one go. Rawstudio can be compiled from source, or download pre-compiled OpenSUSE or Ubuntu packages.

Ubuntu install, in Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rawstudio/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install rawstudio

UFRaw

Unidentified Flying RAW (or UFRaw for short) is a dedicated RAW image editor based on GTK+. It can be used as an application on its own or as a plugin for GIMP (simply open a RAW image in GIMP to be presented with the UFRaw editor window).

The software is especially beneficial to Nikon users as it can easily read the camera's tone curves (Canon and other users can still apply a Nikon curve to their image if desired). Unfortunately sharpening and the ability to embed EXIF data into images from certain (more obscure) camera brands is still not present.

UFRaw is available in ready-to-install packages for a plethora of Linux distributions and other operating systems, along with detailed install instructions.

Ubuntu install, in Terminal:

sudo apt-get install ufraw

Conclusion

Whilst these applications don't offer you the immense amount of customization and sheer tweak-ability of Photoshop's in-built Camera RAW editor, they should at least make post-processing on Linux a bit easier.

If you yourself favour any particular RAW editing program we've not featured here, let us know.

Do you shoot in RAW? Do you edit RAW photos in Linux? Let us know in the comments below.