I’ve recently been using RawTherapee for most of my processing. While there are still dark corners that confound me, for the most part I’m really pleased with what I can do with it.
This weekend I was working on some focus stacking (via ZereneStacker), which generates tiff or jpg files. I wanted to tweak the exposure and colours afterwards. I think of RawTherapee as primarily for RAW files, so I started with GIMP. I used to use it a fair bit, but it’s been years. I discovered that things that are now routine in RawTherapee I couldn’t do easily in Gimp.
This is not a criticisim of Gimp, it’s entirely down to my no longer being familiar with it, and being much more proficient (relatively speaking) with RawTherapee. But it did make me curious how you folks approach this. We are blessed with a suite of tools to use on our images, and while they can work well together, they each require a non-trivial amount of effort to become competent with.
After that ramble, we come to my question: how do you manage your workflow, and particularly which tools you choose to invest the time in learning, and which ones go well together?
I’m a big fan of RawTherapee, but I’d be happy to hear about workflows that don’t include it at all.
Here’s the image that motivated all this (ultimately edited in RT, which of course can handle TIFF as well as RAW):
I am certainly not versed in macro or stacking, but I’d process first in your raw editor, then stack after. I guess most of my stacking to date has been landscapes, so they’re doable in gimp with some simple masking.
In the last couple of years, I’ve been pushing myself harder in the field and arbitrarily limiting myself to just a single frame. So I edit one raw file, and if I can process it solely in darktable, I sort of consider it a personal failure and I try and figure out how I can do better in one frame. I guess that is in part a reaction or rebellion against where computational photography first and now all this AI editing is taking photography at large that I generally do not like. So the single frame it is! And that same vein, I am trying to concentrate on series of images, or a series of single frames.
We’ll see how that holds up, as I just got the Nikon Z 105mm macro lens, so I will probably be mucking around with macro stacking a bit (though my editing computer died so the first set of files from the macro are still on the card).
I guess all that is a very round about way of saying that I try hard to start and end with dark table (or a raw editor in general, I just packaged ART and have been playing with the CTL scripts, very neat). This cuts down on the complexity of the workflow a lot. KISS.
For the most part, I edit in darktable, and don’t leave it. However, there are two exceptions: panorama stitching and denoising.
For the former, I export a bunch of high-quality JPEGs in a specific export preset, then manually open them in PTGUI, and export again, then import back into darktable. It’s tedious, but happens relatively rarely.
For the latter, I don’t have a good process yet. Mostly, darktable denoising does OK. But where it doesn’t, I import the raw file manually in DxO or Topaz, export a denoised DNG, then import again in darktable. This is even more tedious, as it happens before editing, and more frequently than panos. So I mostly avoid it and live with the noise. But I’m not happy with this status quo, compared to how neatly it worked in Lightroom.
Finally, I export JPEGs to my photo archive directory, which from then on is managed by DigiKam. (Funny thing: while I have dabbled with many commercial a raw developer over the years, I have never found even a remotely useful substitute for DigiKam). And I upload finished galleries to Cewe MyPhotos (where I print our yearly photo books, which accrues cloud credits, so the cloud storage is practically free), and of course two regular backups to my NAS and an offsite storage server.
I use darktable for most of my edits and RT is obviously another good choice. Both of these programs could handle JPG, Tiff, PNG and other non-raw files. However, tweaking color and brightness may be best (???) done in tools that are also available in GIMP such as curves and levels. Some modules are designed to adjust exposure in a RAW file and will not perform well will a non-raw. Also obviously white balance is now lost, hence why I turn to levels for minor tweaks of color.
The big advantage of GIMP is when you need layers and masks. Gimp would also have some other advantages.
The reason I use DT is that the localised masking works on every module except a few such as WB. This localised masking has replaced a lot of my need for layers and masks that I used to depend on GIMP for.
I think there’s a lot of potential for similar control via the Local Adjustments tab in RT. I’m just beginning to learn it through, and it’s kind of complicated!
Yes, these tools are very powerful and in the meantime i mostly use them also for global editing.
Ok, its a steep leaning curve, but not really complicated after you get used to it. Btw: with the latest version the “local adjustments” have been renamed to “selective editing”.
