RawTherapee 5.13 changes the default working profile to Rec.2020 and expands selective editing

RawTherapee 5.13 was released on July 26. It enhances Gamut Compression, adds a Michaelis–Menten tone mapper, brings Capture Deconvolution to Selective Editing, improves crop guides, adds presharpening denoise and lets the file browser read colour labels embedded in XMP. HiDPI display and ARM performance also receive improvements.

The default working profile is now Rec.2020 rather than ProPhoto. The project says ProPhoto remains available and the change is optional, but warns that tools including Exposure, Channel Mixer, HSV Equalizer, Soft Light, RGB Curves and Color Toning depend on the selected working profile and may behave differently. The release also adds or improves support for a range of recent cameras and RAW variants.

A default colour-space change deserves a controlled comparison, not a blind fleet-wide update. Studios with shared PP3 profiles should process representative files in both profiles, compare output transforms and keep the chosen working profile explicit. The new tools are useful; colour consistency is the release gate.

We are watching for 5.13 distribution packages, camera-specific regressions, updated RawPedia guidance and compatibility of existing presets. The project explicitly advises using its release tarball rather than GitHub’s automatically generated source archives because the latter omit metadata.