rawpy

rawpy is an easy-to-use Python wrapper for the LibRaw library. It also contains some extra functionality for finding and repairing hot/dead pixels.

API Documentation

Jupyter notebook tutorials

Sample code

Load a RAW file and save the postprocessed image using default parameters:

import rawpy
import imageio

path = 'image.nef'
with rawpy.imread(path) as raw:
    rgb = raw.postprocess()
imageio.imsave('default.tiff', rgb)

Save as 16-bit linear image:

with rawpy.imread(path) as raw:
    rgb = raw.postprocess(gamma=(1,1), no_auto_bright=True, output_bps=16)
imageio.imsave('linear.tiff', rgb)

Find bad pixels using multiple RAW files and repair them:

import rawpy.enhance

paths = ['image1.nef', 'image2.nef', 'image3.nef']
bad_pixels = rawpy.enhance.find_bad_pixels(paths)

for path in paths:
    with rawpy.imread(path) as raw:
        rawpy.enhance.repair_bad_pixels(raw, bad_pixels, method='median')
        rgb = raw.postprocess()
    imageio.imsave(path + '.tiff', rgb)

Installation

Binary wheels for Linux, macOS, and Windows are provided for Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. These can be installed with a simple pip install rawpy. Currently, Linux and macOS wheels are only available as 64 bit versions.

The underlying LibRaw library supports several optional features. The following table shows which PyPI binary wheels support which features.

Feature	Windows	macOS	Linux
LCMS color engine	no	yes	yes
RedCine codec	no	yes	yes
DNG deflate codec	yes	yes	yes
DNG lossy codec	yes	yes	yes
Demosaic Pack GPL2	no	no	no
Demosaic Pack GPL3	no	no	no
OpenMP	yes	no	yes

Tip: You can dynamically query supported features by inspecting the rawpy.flags dictionary.

Note on Windows features: The LCMS color engine and RedCine codec features are currently not supported as the automated build process to generate wheels relies on Anaconda to supply any needed library dependencies. For RedCine codec support, the Windows variant of the Jasper library is missing, and for LCMS color engine support, the LCMS library is missing.

Note on GPL demosaic packs: The GPL2 and GPL3 demosaic packs are not included as rawpy is licensed under the MIT license which is incompatible with GPL.

Installation from source on Linux/macOS

If you have the need to use a specific libraw version or you can't use the provided binary wheels then follow the steps in this section to build rawpy from source.

First, install the LibRaw library on your system.

On Ubuntu, you can get (an outdated) version with:

sudo apt-get install libraw-dev

Or install the latest release version from the source repository:

git clone https://github.com/LibRaw/LibRaw.git libraw
git clone https://github.com/LibRaw/LibRaw-cmake.git libraw-cmake
cd libraw
git checkout 0.19.2
cp -R ../libraw-cmake/* .
cmake .
sudo make install

After that, install rawpy using pip install rawpy --no-binary rawpy.

If you get the error "ImportError: libraw.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" when trying to use rawpy, then do the following:

echo "/usr/local/lib" | sudo tee /etc/ld.so.conf.d/99local.conf
sudo ldconfig

The LibRaw library is installed in /usr/local/lib (if installed manually) and apparently this folder is not searched for libraries by default in some Linux distributions.

NumPy Dependency

rawpy depends on NumPy. The minimum supported NumPy version depends on your Python version:

Python	NumPy
2.7	>= 1.7
3.5	>= 1.9
3.6	>= 1.11
3.7	>= 1.14