&gt;<i>Adobe offers the DNG SDK as open source, it gives quite good clue on how to process RAW images, alternatively dcraw from Dave Coffin has been online for ages and is the basis (in a way or another) of most of open source RAW processing software.</i><p>The DNG software is not really relevant, as it&#x27;s mainly used by smaller camera makers. Yeah, it would be niced if everyone adopted an open standard, but in the real world Nikon, Canon, Sony etc use their own RAW formats, and those are undocumented and proprietary. dcraw from Dave Coffin, on the other hand, is a small, mostly one man, project based on reverse engineering.<p>&gt;<i>Once the CFA bayer (or other mosaicing type) data is available (decrypted as it is crypted for quite a few camera makers), the demosaicing performed and the photo white-balanced and exported with its full dynamic range in a RGB colourspace, you have done most of the technical steps to start working creatively with it.</i><p>Having done &quot;most of the technical steps to start working creatively&quot; and having the best possible image resulting from the decoder is a totally different thing.<p>Choice of demosaicing algorithm (there&#x27;s not an 1-1 mapping between a RAW file and that), and steps applied after that, like sharpening, color correction and some basic curves affect the end result in a big way, and are big parts of what makes a photo software good in its RAW handling. RAW images don&#x27;t just get demosaiced and that&#x27;s it before we view&#x2F;start editing them.