The ART FAQ

  • What is ART? ART is an acronym, standing for Another RawTherapee. It is definitely not art.

  • Isn’t it a stupid name? Yes.

  • So, is this going to change? No.

  • Ok, enough with the name. What are the goals of the project? The main goal is to have fun developing it. A secondary goal is to learn more about image processing. A third goal is to build something that can be useful according to its developer(s). There are no other goals.

  • Why is it published as an open source project then? Because, even if it is not part of the goals, there’s the hope that some of it might be useful to a wider audience. ART is based on a lot of great work done in other open source projects (first and foremost RawTherapee, but many others as well): releasing the code so that it might be used by someone else seems like the right thing to do.

  • Was a fork really necessary? Wouldn’t be better to contribute to RawTherapee instead? RawTherapee has different goals, and is going in a different direction. Trying to live under the same roof would have caused a lot of frustration. Frustration is the opposite of fun. However, we often collaborate with the RawTherapee devs, exchanging ideas and code. We might also meet for drinks when there is a chance.

  • Back to ART then. Why should I use it? You probably shouldn’t. If you are looking for an excellent, free raw processing tool, you can have a look at (in alphabetical order) darktable, Filmulator, LightZone, PhotoFlow, rawproc, RawTherapee itself, or vkdt.

  • Let’s say I want to use it anyway. Is there any support for it? As most open source projects, ART comes with no warranty whatsoever. That said, there is a user forum at pixls.us, where people can ask questions and/or report bugs. For the latter, there is also a bug tracker on GitHub. Although there is no warranty, we dislike buggy software as much as everybody else, so we do our best to address the issues reported.

  • Ok, maybe I’m interested. How can I contribute? If you are interested in programming, we welcome code contributions, both to fix bugs and to implement new features that fit well within the rest of the program. (This is a vague concept on purpose, as fitness is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and – again – there is no guarantee that code contributions will be accepted). If you find a bug, we appreciate bug reports (preferably using the issue tracker, but the forum is also fine). If you have suggestions for improvements, let us know and we’ll think about it. If want to contribute an article, blog post, or tutorial about ART, we will be happy to add a link to it on the webpage.

  • Can I donate some money? Absolutely not. There are so many better ways to use your savings that listing them here is not necessary.

  • When you say “we”, who are you talking about? Mostly me, at the moment, but with significant contributions from Jean-Christophe Frisch (aka Hombre on pixls), all the translators, and help from the larger pixls community.