I have been using RawTherapee for a few months and I am very satisfied: I usually can get a very nice image from my RAW files.
Now I have a problem with a file: I really don’t like the resulting image so I tried it with Adobe Camera Raw and I immediately got a very pleasant image, with the right colors.
Here is the Camera Raw image: I simply selected a custom profile for the camera and I raised Exposure by 0.5:
As you can see the colors are off and the image is very harsh. I played with this image for a lot of time but I have not been able to get a satisfactory result. This is the first time that I have such a problem.
Here’s the pp3: P1110130.RW2.pp3 (11.0 KB)
(it’s from a custom version of RT, but I’ve only used features which should be available in the latest dev).
Sorry, I couldn’t resist playing with this one (my old mountaineering soul revisited).
But using Darktable, I just applied João Almeida’s preset Portra 400 and got this result, which seems to me better than ACR’s. (but I haven’t been there, so yours is the last word)
EDIT: Looking at it better, I think my edit has pushed the sky too far, but then, it’s just a matter of tweaking it a bit more.
Still at the very bottom of the learning curve, but, by reading this book, this image seems to be the perfect ground for a LAB edit.
I struggled with this sort of problem for a long time. In the end, I found that using the ‘neutral’ .dcp file for my camera is often a better starting point than the camera standard profile built into RT (you can get the .dcp files from Adobe’s DNG converter). You can easily compare both the camera standard and the .dcp profile by switching between the two in the Colour Management module and you can switch the tone curve option for the .dcp profile on and off to see which you prefer as the starting point.
I just checked on my home screen, and I confirm my impression that this version is quite close to the ACR one. What exactly did you do in RT? I agree with @Morgan_Hardwood that using the default profile gets you pretty close already.
I think the difference can be accounted for by the difference in which ACR and RT interpret your camera white balance – the RT version could use some warming up and taking away a bit of magenta, I think.
Many thanks to all the people who posted messages to help me, you have been very kind!
After reading Morgan_Hartwood’s message I downloaded the latest dev version (964) and, with great surprise, I discovered that it created an image very similar to the ACR one.
Then I tested the official 5.4 version (no dev) with the same file and .pp3 and it showed the bad colors that caused me problems.
So it looks like in recent times the color output changed, and with this image it changed in a significant way.
I am just now starting out with RT, having used it a month ago to play with some infrared photos.
From what I think I’m reading here, I should update my system to use the “new dev version”. Maybe it’s too early for me to even worry about this, but how would I go about replacing the old version with the new version? Is this just downloading a file from somewhere, and then selecting it in RT?
I just arrived in India, and plan to shoot only in DNG and do my editing only in RT, at least for the photos that most interest me. This is in addition to whatever I do in Lightroom.
(So much confusion in my mind, RawTherapee seems MUCH more capable than Lightroom, but then this morning I was reading about Darktable, which is similar to RT I think. Then I need to find a way to organize these images, as I now do in Lightroom, and Digikam seems to be popular, but then I read about it crashing quite often. One thing at a time. I have an extra MacBook Air, pretty much worn out, but it still works. I set it up with RT, Digikam, and Darktable. )
