Has anyone used Raw Therapee as an image editor?

[Cargo]

After reading the thread about PS by arthurking today and also seeing a review of Darktable ........ only available for Mac, unfortunate for me, cause it looked good !!!!!
I had a look at some of the editors available. I have found one that is likened to Lightroom and Darktable called Raw Therapee, Its a free download (which makes it very attractive )
So before going ahead I was curious to see if anyone on here has heard of it or used it ??

Cheers Cargo

[WhoDo]

I've used it before and found it was a less than satisfactory tool in some cases. I used it when I shot Pentax and it didn't handle the raw files particularly well at all. It may have changed since. If you're looking for a free editor, I thoroughly recommend GIMP in conjunction with the UFRaw plug-in and the Fx-Foundry photographic extensions. All are FREE (as in beer).

[Cargo]

Thanks Waz .....
i have had Gimp for a while now, but struggled with it and left it alone Might go back and have another look now I'm a bit more confident with editing. See how I go
Cheers Cargo

[WhoDo]

Thanks Waz .....
i have had Gimp for a while now, but struggled with it and left it alone Might go back and have another look now I'm a bit more confident with editing. See how I go
Cheers Cargo

Just had a look at the latest Raw Therapee and it DOES look a lot like Lightroom and seems quite different to the version I remember trying out. Give it a try if you found GIMP too complicated. After all, even GIMP has many tools a photographer is unlikely to need. Hope that helps.

[Mary Anne]

Cargo: wetpixels uses it, hopefully he will see this..

[Cargo]

Thanks Mary Anne
Hope he sees it too .....
Cheers Cargo

[fillum]

Recently came across LightZone (Win / Mac / Linux). Looks really interesting but haven't had a chance to check it out yet...



Cheers.

[Cargo]

Hey Phil

I have had a quick look at RT and it looks like a big learning curve ..... But I think most of this kind of software is, for me at least !!!!!
I think I'll stick to RT firstly & ask Wet Pixels what he thinks. Way too many to many downloads & confusion otherwise

Cargo

[Dazz1]

Hey Phil

I have had a quick look at RT and it looks like a big learning curve ..... But I think most of this kind of software is, for me at least !!!!!
I think I'll stick to RT firstly & ask Wet Pixels what he thinks. Way too many to many downloads & confusion otherwise

Cargo

Hi there...

Yep I use RT all the time. It is very capable, but yes, like a lot of the good software, it takes a little while to figure your way around it.

Mostly I just use it in a very simple way. A quick rundown... I use digiKam to manage my photos and find the raw file I want to edit, but whatever way you do it, even just with a file manager, I use the 'Open with' to open the raw file in RT, bypassing RT's built in photo/file manager. I adjust the basics, such as white balance, exposure (this is when you get to use highlight recovery etc. to fix that wrongly exposed snap), straighten the picture, crop it, do some sharpening (contrast by detail levels works really well), and noise reduction, save the processing profile (all the current adjustments) in case I want it again, then I use the button to "Edit the current image in external editor" to transfer the result to Gimp for final editing if required.

Happy to discuss further if I can be of help.

[arthurking83]

FWIW: I remember being overwhelmed a bit by RT too early on, but I learned to use the basic workflow quite quickly with it.

Very similar in basic concept to LR(which I also have).
The most immediate aspect that felt overwhelming is the complexity in some of the tools(eg. sharpening) where LR and others just give you a more basic option to use!

As an example of the weird sharpening tools, the threshold adjustment is like nothing else.
it has this weird looking graph system, as opposed to a points/percentage system in other software.

WB adjustment is crazily out of this world, and pretty much unusual in what you can do with it.
But this WB craziness is not really applicable to many real world situations, and just interesting(for the moment).

The WB tool is what actually got me onto RT to begin with, and then I just play with it here and there for the fun of it.

So far tho, it seems to produce very high quality outputs, which is also important and why it's stayed on my PC for such a long time now.

[Cargo]

Many Thanks WP and Arthur

You have given me a great starting point and tomorrow I'll will get stuck into some Raw files on RT
I'm excited now where as before I was overwhelmed

Thanks again
Cargo

[arthurking83]

Note something tho.

RT doesn't do any localised editing .... dodge/burn, or gradient selection type adjustments.
They are only globally made.

So in effect, it's really a raw converter software rather than a image editor.

[Liney]

I must admit I use RT as well, but I also use GIMP for some tweaks. I've started using it since I went over to shooting in RAW. I've been through the manual and have a good idea what does what.

Saying that I still need to get a flow going, anyone got any good tips for the first <three?/five?/ten?> controls to check/adjust?

[fenderstrat1963]

I guess it depends on the image you're editing, but generally I work through:

- Ratings and tags (button on top of the Editor view)
- Dark frame (on the 5th tab - RAW)
- Chromatic aberration (on the 5th tab - RAW)
- Correct horizons (button on top of the Editor view)
- Crop (button on top of the Editor view)
- White balance (button on top of the Editor view)
- Exposure (on the 1st tab - Exposure)
- Brightness / contrast / saturation (use the curves if the sliders don't do a good job) (on the 1st tab - Exposure)
- Local contrast and tone mapping if necessary (on the 1st tab - Exposure)
- Noise reduction (on the 2nd tab - Detail)
- Output and edit in Gimp using layers
- Sharpening

I'm another RawTherapee / Gimp user. They're both available on all the platforms I use (Mac, Linux and Windows) and if I can use them anyone can.

[Dazz1]

Good to see others also using the software I use. Means there's more chance of helping each other when we get stuck.

I like the list given above by fenderstrat. I just wanted to say, on the majority of raw images, I find a smaller subset is all I use.

- straighten and crop
- white balance
- exposure adjustment - often with a little highlight recovery
- sharpening/noise reduction

For this last step, I turn off the sharpening and instead use "Contrast by detail" raising the first 2 sliders (finest and next finest) to at least 3.0. Then use noise reduction by pushing the luminance slider to full, then raising the luminance detail slider to restore the detail, but not enough to make the noise too visible. This usually get's a clean image that has enough detail that the final sharpening, later in Gimp, will really bring up the detail nicely with minimal noise

- transfer to Gimp for more PP
- final sharpening in Gimp using high-pass filter sharpening

[Mark L]

....
- straighten and crop
- white balance
- exposure adjustment - often with a little highlight recovery
- sharpening/noise reduction
....

So, other than noise reduction, do you think it does a better job than DPP on RAW images? Suspect you may get a better result using DPP before transferring to GIMP?

[Dazz1]

So, other than noise reduction, do you think it does a better job than DPP on RAW images? Suspect you may get a better result using DPP before transferring to GIMP?

DPP is a windows program only isn't it? I seem to remember it can be run under Linux via wine, but I'd rather a real Linux program. I can only compare it to Ufraw, as that's the only other Linux native raw processor I have used much. I think it is better than ufraw.

I think the quality of the result would depend on more the skill of the operator than on the program chosen wrt DPP vs RT.

However, even though I don't use rt's other features every time, they are very nice. The sharpening via detail levels is something I really want to have, so I would use it for that alone. Do other programs have this facility?

[Mark L]

DPP is a windows program only isn't it? I seem to remember it can be run under Linux via wine, but I'd rather a real Linux program.

Not sure about that, since I simply use windows.

[fenderstrat1963]

There is a version of DPP for OSX, but I don't think there's one for Linux

[Cargo]

A bit more interest and some more ideas popping up in this thread
I have been practising with RT a bit, but I found that besides the the WB tool which was great, my photos lost clarity and sharpness when transferred.
So I haven't really gotten back into it ..... Anyway might have another play

Cheers Cargo