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.

Southport beach, Merseyside, November 2021. Taken with Canon EOS RP, CR3 RAW image edited in Corel Aftershot Pro.