[stephen_g]

I think your premise is a bit faulty. A photographer basically never gives anybody a raw image unless they’re giving up control of how the final image looks to somebody else (as some other said, there are some special circumstances, such as competitions - but this is not for anybody to use for presentation, just ensuring that the image hasn’t been altered in ways not allowed - i.e compositing multiple photos to fake some amazing occurrence).

Processing the raw file is almost as much a creative art as composition and photography itself! So if a application processes raw images in a way the photographer likes better than the algorithms another app uses, then all the better. They’re going to export it in the end anyway.

The camera manufacturers of course do release specifications and probably proprietary code for processing raw images from their cameras to companies like Adobe to use in Lightroom under NDA, which I assume they use as a basis, but all these apps have their own ways of doing adjustment and extra processing too.