http://www.rawtherapee.com/? Check this out if you wish, it's a donationware (free to try, but the author requests at least a minimum donation if you can afford it and choose to use it regularly) RAW processor. I'm not able to make adequate analysis of it, I'm just not good enough at RAW processing to be able to tell how good it is. But it looks reasonably nice, it seems to be reasonably well developed. My main reason for being excited about it is that it offers a deconvolution based sharpening algorithm. Deconvolution is an impressive technique perhaps more frequently used in astrophotography, you can take a picture of a point light source (star) and let the software analyze how the star is distorted, and then apply that to a more complex object like a planet and actually undo blur effects from atmospheric distortion. The point is, this method doesn't just create the impression of sharpness by increasing the contrast around edges, it can REALLY unblur things and reveal real detail. I don't know how well that works for terrestrial applications, though. The deconvolution applications I've read up on so far require stars against black skies to figure out how to unblur other things. With a scene full of detail I'm not sure how much can be done. But the option is there, and it appears to work at least adequately. The program also has an interesting claim to fame in that it has several different demosaicing algorithms available, you can choose one of several methods for how it takes the color mosaic sensor data and integrates it into a standard color image. Again, I can't begin to evaluate if this makes any difference. No OSX version though, which is a little bit of a surprise since there are both Linux and Ubuntu versions available in addition to the requisite Windows version.
