Make it possible to disable rotation to EXIF orientation

[10110111]

I need to perform basic processing of my raw image, like white balancing and demosaicing, and then export it to a JPEG/TIFF so that further processing could be done in other software (that, in particular, would measure lens distortion, where the shift of the center of projection is sensitive to orientation). For this the orientation must be preserved as it was in the raw file: the top-left side of the sensor data should be at the top-left position in the output image, with EXIF indicating the same orientation as the EXIF Orientation tag in the original raw file does.

What I see in RawTherapee is that whenever I import a raw image, it automatically gets rotated according to the EXIF data. On export the EXIF Orientation tag gets set to unrotated, so the information on orientation with respect to camera sensor is lost. I haven't found any UI to turn this behavior off.

So please make it possible to turn off automatic rotation and preserve the EXIF Orientation tag in the output file—or, if I simply failed to find an existing option, please advise me on where to find it.

[kmilos]

I need to perform basic processing of my raw image, like white balancing and demosaicing

You could perhaps use simpler tools like dcraw_emu from the LibRaw package for this.