How to develop RAW photos for free
Paint by Zaweba opens RAW files from most cameras in its RAW Developer, with white balance, tone, colour, detail, optics and local adjustments.
RAW files can be developed for free in Paint by Zaweba, an offline image editor for Windows. Open a RAW file, or run Filter > RAW Developer (Ctrl+Shift+A), and you get the full set of development controls: white balance, tone, colour, detail, lens and geometry corrections, effects, calibration and local adjustments with brush, linear and radial masks.
A RAW file holds what the camera's sensor recorded, before the camera turned it into a JPEG. That leaves far more room to recover highlights, lift shadows and set colour than a JPEG does. It also means every RAW file needs developing before it looks like a finished photo.
Which files it opens
Paint by Zaweba opens DNG, Canon CR2 and CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Olympus ORF, Fujifilm RAF, Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF and more. RAW files open as 16-bit documents, which keeps smooth gradients through heavy edits.
Step by step
Open the RAW file. The RAW Developer appears. A sensible order is the one most photographers think in, from the whole picture down to the details.
Set white balance first, so colours are right before you judge anything else. Then exposure and contrast. Then highlights and shadows, to bring back a bright sky and open up dark areas. Whites and blacks set the very ends of the range.
Texture, clarity and dehaze add or reduce local contrast: texture for fine surface detail, clarity for mid sized shapes, and dehaze for haze in landscapes. Vibrance and saturation control colour strength, vibrance more gently.
For more control, there's a tone curve, a colour mixer for adjusting individual colours, and colour grading to tint shadows, midtones and highlights.
In the detail section, set sharpening and noise reduction. Doing noise reduction here, before the picture is finished, usually gives the cleanest result.
Lens, geometry and local fixes
Optics corrects lens problems. Geometry includes Upright for straightening converging lines, and cropping. Effects and calibration fine tune the overall look and the camera's colour.
Local adjustments let you change only part of the picture. Brush masks paint where a change applies. Linear masks give a graduated change, ideal for darkening a sky. Radial masks make an oval, good for lifting a face or adding a vignette.
Your settings stay safe
RAW development settings are kept in a .ptraw sidecar file next to the RAW. The RAW itself is never changed, so you can come back, change any setting or start again from scratch.
When you're done, the developed picture opens in Paint by Zaweba as a normal document, and the whole editor is available: layers, retouching, selections, text and export.
Getting a good result
Expose for the highlights when shooting. A RAW file can lift shadows a long way, but a sky that's blown completely white has nothing to recover.
Make big global changes first and local ones after. It's easy to spend time painting masks and then change the white balance, which alters everything you painted.
Use a light touch on clarity and dehaze. A little adds depth, and a lot creates halos and a crunchy look.
Developing more than one photo
Because the RAW Developer is also a filter, it can be run on a picture that's already open, which makes the same controls available for JPEGs and other files. For a set of RAW photos, getting one right and using its settings as a starting point for the others keeps a shoot consistent. For a free, private RAW workflow on Windows, Paint by Zaweba covers the full journey from sensor data to finished picture.
