I am posting this as a heads-up for anybody who is not familiar with Raw Therapee or who tried it in the past and dismissed it as too slow. RT is a free RAW converter, an ongoing project, and version 2.1 has just been released. It is now as fast as any other converter I’ve used (my setup – XP/SP2, P4/3.0Ghz, 1.0 Gb RAM) and has added some great features. Those that really impressed me are:
The quality of the demosaicing algorithm. You have a choice between two, EAHD and HPHD, the latter being faster. Both give superb resolution of fine detail. Below is a comparison I did. The crops are 200% and no sharpening was done in any of the converters.
Highlight recovery. Again, a choice of two. Color Propagation is similar to Bibble in that an attempt is made to reconstruct the color of the highlight – sometimes with success, sometimes less so. Luminance Recovery is like ACR in that false color is avoided by equalizing the channels to produce grey tones.
Brightness adjustment in either RGB or Lab space. Curves tool for both.
Color adjustments (hue and saturation) and NR in Lab space.
As I said, RT is a work in progress, so what does it still lack? First, it is not color managed so all output is written only to sRGB space without an embedded profile. However, when you open the image in a CM application you can easily assign the sRGB space. Second, it doesn’t have batch capability.
RT is free, but its author receives donations. I sent him one in the hope that it will help to enable him to advance the project. 
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& digiscope with a Fuji A800
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