I’m a Lightroom refugee, and I was wondering what people recommend as a workflow in RT as there doesn’t seem to be any particular flow built into the UI.
For example in LR, I would normally work my way from top to bottom in the panels and it gave a fairly nice workflow.
Hi @Stuart_Stent!
The processing pipeline is actually fixed in RT, so you can feel free to approach the options any way you want.
There’s a basic workflow documented over on the Rawpedia:
There are an abundance of modules, so you need to find the ones you like. You’ll need to experiment a bit. After that, working from top to bottom of each tab, then left to right on the tabs isn’t a bad way to start.
I generally do exposure, lab adjustment, wavelets, crop resize, and sharpen, in that order.
Hi @Stuart_Stent & welcome!
There are many interesting workflows to be found here in this forum
as well as on https://paulsphotopalace.wordpress.com
(dropdown Rawtherapee | A beginners Guide | 1 … 6).
Even if there is no universal workflow that fits every kind of photo, I find
that trying to follow the favourites of other forum members often will give
me new insights & ideas…
Good luck & have fun!
@paperdigits I’d be interested to know the reasons why you leave cropping to the end. My own habit is to start with the crop so that I’m working only on the portion of the photo I think I’m going to want (which in turn generally means I am dealing with a composition error!). But I’m not terribly experienced in photo manipulation and could be overlooking something important.
I’ve added resize and sharpen to my original post.
I don’t crop too often, but when I do, it is often to change the aspect ratio (usually to 1:1). I’d rather develop the whole image so I have some wiggle room to move the crop around. There isn’t a technical reason to leave cropping til the end; I find that is what works best for me.
This is the same for me, actually. I’ll leave pixel-editing to the end and this includes cropping. I think I tend to develop the entire image and usually focus on colors, tones, and details overall first. After my pixel-pushing I’ll start cropping based on how the image feels to me (I’ve been known to produce half a dozen crop options at least and sit on them for a while before deciding).
Absolutely! I print an image and hang it somewhere where I have to look at it a lot, and after a week or two, make another pass and produce a final print. But I am the worlds slowest editor… So…