Editing Canon CR3 files on Ubuntu / Linux

Like blogging (!), photography is a hobby I dabble with intermittently. I bought a new camera (Canon EOS RP) to replace my 2007 EOS 40D last year during lockdown and haven’t used it that much since.

One thing that irritated me last year when I got the camera was to discover that it used a new RAW format, CR3, which had no support in tools that worked on Linux. So I sort of gave up shooting RAW for a while. While I’m not dogmatically against Microsoft or paid software, I just prefer using Ubuntu to Windows and I didn’t want to have to switch just to edit some photos.

Anyway, a year or more passed without me spending a lot of time thinking about photography or worrying about the problem of opening CR3 files. So I was recently pleased to discover that Corel Aftershot Pro has added support for CR3 (and the EOS R series cameras that use it) in Update 7 in early 2021.

And, amazingly, Aftershot Pro works perfectly on Ubuntu 20.04. Well, not quite perfectly, it crashes infrequently, but it’s not enough to be a problem and you don’t seem to lose any work if it does crash.

No, Aftershot Pro is not open source and it’s not free – but it is inexpensive – it seems to sell for around £80 but always seems to be on sale for below £50. I’m more than happy to support makers of high quality software that runs on Linux, and can definitely recommend it.

I don’t want to promise what I won’t deliver, but I’ll try to do another post at some point explaining my full photo editing workflow on Ubuntu.