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.
![](https://www.tjwood.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/202111-southport-beach-1-1024x683.jpg)
unfortunately could not install it on Ubunto 20.04. it faild with
electing previously unselected package aftershot3x64.
(Reading database … 303055 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack AfterShotPro3-system-QT.deb …
Unpacking aftershot3x64 (370446:3.7.0.446) …
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of aftershot3x64:
aftershot3x64 depends on qt5-image-formats-plugins (>= 5.4.0); however:
Package qt5-image-formats-plugins is not installed.
dpkg: error processing package aftershot3x64 (–install):
dependency problems – leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for shared-mime-info (1.15-1) …
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.36.0-1ubuntu1) …
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.24-1ubuntu3) …
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.64ubuntu1) …
Errors were encountered while processing:
aftershot3x64
I’m sure it’s far too late now, but in case anyone finds this in future, I’m sure you could resolve that error by running “sudo apt install qt5-image-formats-plugins” – since that is the package it is complaining about.