Free editor that handles raw files properly: what are people actually using every day? Editing

Worth pricing what you are actually escaping. The photography bundle is now around twenty dollars a month for the terabyte plan, and the cheap twenty-gigabyte tier went up to about fifteen and is closed to new subscribers, so the old nine-ninety-nine everyone quotes in these threads is gone. If your objection was the price at the old rate, the number has moved and the calculation is different now.

Darktable is the one people actually keep, and the honest framing is that it takes a weekend rather than an hour. The interface is not going to become friendly, but the raw processing genuinely competes with paid tools and the catalogue handles a forty-thousand-file library on external storage without complaint. RawTherapee is the alternative if you prefer its sharpening and demosaicing, with a weaker library side. Whichever you pick, learn the module order first, because that is what makes it feel arbitrary at the start.

Separate the catalogue problem from the editing problem before you commit. A lot of people are unhappy with a free editor because they are really unhappy with how it manages files, and a dedicated culling tool plus any developer is a better shape for a big landscape library than one application trying to do both.

Also check what your camera manufacturer gives you. Several of them ship a free raw converter that knows the sensor and the lens profiles better than anything third party, and they are usually slow and unpleasant and produce excellent files. I use one for the handful of shots I care about and something faster for culling.

Whatever you choose, export a set of finished JPEGs alongside the raws. Editing decisions live in a database or a sidecar file and both of those are software-specific, so the day you switch tools you keep the negatives and lose the prints unless you did that.