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RawTherapee

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Damn, you got me excited for a minute that there was new release. But no, this hasn't been updated since 2020. I use rawtherapee a lot, and really like it. There is fork, ART, which is more up to date. But in my experience rawtherapee is snappier, for some reason, so I stick with that most of the time. But if you want something more cutting edge then try ART

https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/wiki/FAQ

There’s a news article with project status on the site from a couple of months ago: https://www.rawtherapee.com/2022/07/rawtherapee-5.9-wip-and-...

why do you use this over say, Krita?

Can't say if rawtherapee achieves this goal, but the purpose of photo developing software is to make small, common edits to large amounts of photos. To aid in selecting between and retouching dozens if not hundreds of photos from a shoot. The goal of krita/Photoshop is to do detailed editing on one image at a time. That's why you'd use something like this.

I should try rawtherapee to see if it's good and fast enough at that.

How is denoise quality? I switched from Darktable to commercial DxO PhotoLab, largely because by the time Darktable tames noise at around ISO 3200, a lot of resolution and color is lost. PhotoLab seems to take everything thrown at it and end up with a bright smooth image. Anyway that's one weakness in otherwise great free tool.

I don't blame you for switching from Darktable at all. Darktable can be quite powerful but it suffers from ease of use and discoverability issues. It's not reasonable for a photo processing application to expect its users to deeply understand how it all works under the hood in order to get good results.

As someone who did a deep dive into understanding DT's scene-referred modules, it changed the way I think of photo processing. I now have a hard time using any other photo software.

What did you use as a resource for this? I struggle with DT on every update to get my photos looking like I want when the semantics of a module change or a module is replaced with something theoretically better but practically with more controls that I now need to relearn.

The manual has some good overview and explains every module and slider.

Bruce Williams, Studio Pektras, and Boris on YouTube. Aurlien Pierre if you need in-depth, technical explanation.

Yup, I have the same experience even in smaller ways. Wavelet decomposition, parametric masks, Lab curves -- these things are fundamental to how I think of image processing now, and it all came out of forcing myself to be productive with Darktable.

None of those things are available in commercial processing software.

(Granted, it was a few years ago I did photography stuff last, so this may well have changed since then.)

> suffers from ease of use

Yup, and they keep making it harder to use.

I recently upgraded my system and now I can't even open a folder in Darktable, I have to add it to some bullshit "library", put the library in a "collection", and then open a "film roll" from the collection. Why can't I just browse a filesystem tree and click a folder, damnit ...

Impulse noise reduction in RawTherapee is pretty good.

For darktable, there was some changes to noise reduction a few releases ago, and its now recommended to use two instances of the profiled denoise module, on that targets luma noise and one that targets chroma noise. It also works pretty well.

Neither work as well as the DxO prime, which is the best noise reduction I've ever seen.

> Darktable tames noise at around ISO 3200, a lot of resolution and color is lost.

Could you elaborate on what this means?

I tried Darktable a few months ago, and no matter how hard I tried, my images just looked "washed out".

I assume this is what you mean. I really wanted to use DT because the parametric masking features were pretty nice, but every image looked vaguely bleached.

If you've got 50 minutes for a very complete and in depth answer, this video by Aurelien who works on the pixel pipe covers why Darktable tends to look washed out (out of the box) compared to other apps and how to conceptualize what it's doing and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwB7FogUs

Thank you. That's actually one of the videos that I watched a few months back. It helped a little bit, but not enough for my tastes.

It just seemed like there was a LOT of extra tweaking I needed to do for each image. My suspicion is that if you want to use DT (effectively), you need to have a deep understanding of color theory and image processing (at least more than I am willing to devote).

I also enjoyed his rant(s) on the new releases of DT, especially the complaints about the UI.

I had similar experiences with DT. When taking RAW+JPG I always struggled to create an edit of the RAW in DT that is more satisfying than the out of camera JPG - and I watched quite a few videos and read a few guides, also trying to work with scene-referred workflow introduced in DT4. I'm currently giving Capture One a shot (Express version is free for Sony users) and I'm really pleased how accessible the UI is. Applying default adjustments already gives a great starting point for further tweaking (similar or better than the OOC JPG). Recovering highlights also works way better than in DT. It just felt like the algorithms in DT are sometimes not quite on the same level.

I never tried RawTherapee.

> I'm currently giving Capture One a shot

This is what I use, too.

I did a lot of side-by-side comparisons between C1 & DT on my raw files and I could not get DT to make anything that looked like C1's automatic adjustments.

The best I could determine is that the out-of-the-box adjustments made by C1 were somewhat complex (e.g., it wasn't a 'simple' transformation of rgb values).

Obviously, it's preferable to know what's happening under the hood instead of relying on black-magic, but I just didn't have the time to invest in trying to figure that out.

C1 is really nice. I also compared it to Lightroom and I didn't like those results as much as C1.

edit: Although C1's masking features are excellent, I wish they had more parametric masking features. That's the one thing I miss from DT.

Did you work with denoising the chroma channels separately from luminance? I believe that's a large part of the trick -- humans are far less sensitive to colour resolution issues, and chroma noise just looks awful compared to luminance noise.

I was always very doubtful about those AI tools, but I absolutely second DxO. It actually managed to save some Astro Shots which were completely noisy to a manageable level, without too much noticeable LoD

I would love to use the open source alternatives to Lightroom, but I find the cloud offering too convenient. The photos are available from everywhere, even on my phone I can import photos directly from the SD card and start doing light edits. When I arrive home, all the photos have already been copied to my computer where I can finish the project on the big screen.

Is there something that approximates this "effortless" experience using some cloud service and the freedom to use whatever software to manage and convert the photos?

I keep all my raw files in git-annex. I wouldn't say that it is effortless, you need to have a good understand of git, but if you do, it works really well and is extremely flexible. Raw files go in git annex and sidecar files (XMP, PP3) go into git itself.

Portability has become a challenge for me in darktable (which is my only choice in photo-editing).

My archive is now large enough (~8 TB) that it is impractical to carry around. Keeping edits synchronized between home and remote is hard. Darktable's internal database doesn't play well with remote edits, either. It's tricky.

I'm convinced that there is a simple/clever solution to the problem using existing tools (rsync/git/google drive/etc), but it will require someone with a really solid understanding of Darktable's inner workings and data-structures to prevent corruption of the database/library or, worse, the archive itself.

Yes. I love Lightroom for that. It's very convenient and approachable. I think the dealbreaker for me for not using RawTherapee/Darktable was the performance. Lightable or Capture One are way more snappier to work with. You see results as you change things. Which is really important when I'm editing bunch of photos at once.

I have it installed, but frankly DT has been really great for my workflow I'm really just a novice shooting a mirrorless vlog camera right now - a Sony ZV-E10 with some vintage Canon, Minolta and Nikkor lenses. I have a few Nikon DSLRs but they only thing they give me is a view finder.

Many years ago, I used Apple Aperture when all my real photographer friends were using LightRoom so... I honestly don't know what I'm missing by not using the Adobe product.

What is DT?

Darktable

Darktable is great! Some things work differently to Lightroom, but it is great if you know what you do in post processing. Not that I really know what I do in post, but I believe that I get better at it.

I've been using it for years with great pleasure. I don't regret anything about lightroom and photoshop used previously. Some of my pictures I edited with it:

http://federicobonfiglio.it

Good comparison from DPReview:

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0404869946/the-best-open-s...

I thought that article was quite lazy. It was a long winded way of saying "I opened some photos in each application and compared the out-of-the-box rendering to LightRoom, but made no further effort to try and see what might make these applications worthwhile."

Does it support JPEG XL ? ;)

https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl

In the next release it will.

Not going to lie, with this name I thought this was a prank website somehow related to that Raw Water fad.

So glad to learn it's a good tool!

Looks like a nice tool.

I can tell you that the "raw conversion" step is not for the faint of heart. This is the part between Bayer format, and classic RGB.

It's advantageous to try doing some of the pipeline processing before the demosaic step.

It took me a while to figure out how the heck to use it (for what I was trying to use it for, because it can do a lot of things), but once I did, I learned to really like it.

Anyone have experience with this vs Darktable?

I feel Darktable is a lot more powerful and the UI is a little easier to use (small things, like the way sliders work with mouse and keyboard). Masking in DT is great as well.

What I like about Raw Therapee, the starting point when processing RAW files is a lot closer to out of camera JPEG, and for just minor tweaks it's simpler and faster.

There's also an alternative build of Raw Therapee as well. https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/wiki/Home

I like the interface on RT better than Darktable, but man, RT is dog slow on a Mac. I have a pretty beefy iMac, but scrolling through photos is just too slow. Darktable's noticeably better in that, but honestly, there's some quirks and bugs with interfaces that make it hard to use. It isn't as quick as a native app, and zooming/scrolling is stupidly sensitive with a Magic Mouse. I understand a lot of these performance issues are GTK 3 and below issues.

I fully tried to transition to one of those, but at the end of the day, I went back to Aperture running under Retroactive. It's probably not a long term solution, but hopefully by the time it does finally break for good, GTK 4 would have been adopted by more and more apps.

Darktable is more like Lightroom. RT works on single images mostly. Both are capable of great results. I use both with my Sony A7-III.

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