I am the happy owner of a Nikkon D5500 and started shooting NEF for the last 6 month.
To make a first selection of my NEF files I use FastStone Image Viewer 5.5 (FS). When reviewing a NEF in FS it appears similar to the LCD screen of my camera (or the JPG version that would be generated by the camera).
When I open the same file in RT, a profile (pp3) is automatically applied. However sometimes I just would like to change limited parameters to the picture as it would come out of the camera. Is there any means to ask RT to apply a profile with the same parameters as the built-in camera post-processing does?
I know an alternative is to convert the NEF in JPG thru FS and edit the JPG but for some reasons I would prefer to edit directly the NEF in RT.
Set your camera to take both a NEF and high quality jpg along with whatever, if any, non default jpg conversion setting you use. Then process the jpgs in RT. Except for pre demosaicing operations such as highlight recovery RT and jpgs are a great combination. Remember for every raw file loose in the world there are 100’s of jpgs.[quote=“slimsegi, post:3, topic:767”]
There’s no way to exactly match the camera output if you actually process the raw file, though.
Never tried it but I suspect if you made you own HCLT film setting for a NEF conversion you might comes close.
The demosaicing, noise reduction and lens corrections will still be different, but you processed RAW will look very close to the Jpeg produced by the camera.
I can give you detailed instructions if you are interested, personally I use this method almost all the time to have a good starting point for my edits. One can always go back to the default Adobe camera matrices if a more neutral result is needed…
[quote=“slimsegi, post:1, topic:767”]
an alternative is to convert the NEF in JPG thru FS and edit the JPG
[/quote]That’s not an alternative if you’re shooting raw, as then you’re completely discarding the raw data and everything that comes with it. If you choose to shoot raw, don’t now throw away that benefit by working on a JPEG or trying to make it look like a JPEG! Eating apple-flavored sweets is not an alternative to eating an apple.
[quote=“slimsegi, post:1, topic:767”]
I use FastStone Image Viewer 5.5 (FS). When reviewing a NEF in FS it appears similar to the LCD screen of my camera (or the JPG version that would be generated by the camera).
[/quote]Most likely FastStone Image Viewer does not really support raw files, it just shows you the JPEG image which is embedded in every raw file. RawTherapee uses this JPEG too, for the thumbnails before you open a photo for the first time.
[quote=“CarVac, post:2, topic:767”]
There’s no way to exactly match the camera output if you actually process the raw file
[/quote]You can match it as long as you haven’t used any Nikon-specific settings like Active D-Lighting.
I think you’ll find (as many of us do), that you will end up getting better* results that are more suited/personalized to your personal style as you learn to process the raw files yourself.
* Better being completely subjective here but I think most will agree that this is the case (as long as you aren’t judging better by the camera jpg only.
Obviously you haven’t tried the using RT on a jpg or you wouldn’t be so dismissive.
Case one – it’s not my thing but if someone wants a print with exactly the same colors he got straight out of the camera but with not as much noise or perhaps needs to sharpen the detail he could put the JPEG in RT and use the noise reduction or wavelets to create a better looking image.
Case two – if you are like me and have multi-years of JPEG’s on your computer from before you owned a camera that shot raw and you want to clean them up so you can distribute them to various friends and relatives who may or may not appreciate receiving a disk full of pictures in the mail you have no choice but to use a JPEG.
Case three – you receive a scan of a badly exposed 20 year old snapshot of a boy playing around with his recently dead sister and are asked if you can clean it up. The end result after some fiddling with RT wasn’t hanging on the wall quality but what came out was definitely better than what when in.
And of course if you shot the RAW and know all the tricks naturally go with that.
[quote=“scribble, post:9, topic:767”]
Obviously you haven’t tried the using RT on a jpg or you wouldn’t be so dismissive.
[/quote]I spent maybe 10 years on this program, I help develop it and regularly test things on raw and non-raw images.
[quote=“scribble, post:9, topic:767”]
Case one (…) two (…) three[/quote]
The case at hand is neither of those.
[quote=“slimsegi, post:1, topic:767”]
sometimes I just would like to change limited parameters to the picture
[/quote]That’s quite vague, fact is we don’t know what Segi really wants to change. If it’s to crop and resize, then he can probably do that in FastStone Image Viewer. If its anything else, then use the raw. Sure he can do some things to the JPEG and still end up with a good result, but as he already has the raw he might as well use it. Just use a curve to match the preview in RT to the preview in FSIV, and save the processing profile as “Nikon D5500 out-of-cam look.pp3” or whatever. I’d also activate “Chromatic Aberration Auto-correction” and “Noise Reduction - Chrominance - Method - Automatic global”, perhaps also load an LCP. Doing that makes subsequent edits easier (you don’t need to bother extracting the JPEG), it opens up new possibilities such as highlight and shadow recovery and better colors, and offers generally higher quality all around.
[quote=“Carmelo_DrRaw, post:5, topic:767”]
In the case of Nikon cameras, you can at least precisely match the colours of the in-camera Jpeg:
[/quote]I didn’t know that very cool! I guess I’ll need to try that on a windows/mac box one of these days. Did you check if they use actual LUTs in the ICC or just a color matrix?
I wanted to do a little experiment in writing a tool that tries to create an icc to match the colors/levels of (a bunch of) raw files to their embeded jpegs. Could be useful, but I haven’t dug deep enough to be able to quickly pull that off (yet).
Then again, often just creating a color profile using a target is good enough if not better. It certainly made my a6000 a whole lot more bearable.
Did you check if they use actual LUTs in the ICC or just a color matrix?