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

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)

Binary wheels for Linux, macOS, and Windows are provided for Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6. These can be installed with a simple pip install rawpy. Currently, Linux and macOS wheels are only available as 64 bit versions.

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On Ubuntu, you can get (an outdated) version with: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 0.18.2
cp -R ../libraw-cmake/* .
cmake .
sudo make install

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

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.

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