I have Lightroom 2023 and the rest of the Adobe bunch at work. Photography is only a small part of what I do but just last week I had a days worth of photos to “develop”. I tried using LR but just had to give up. The ui and workflow of the recent Adobe software is just so annoying. I can’t avoid Photoshop so I grit my teeth and use it. LR however was just to much of an hassle but Rawtherapee 5.9 proper doesn’t work on my apple silicon mac but I remembered RC1 working and could hunt it down.
So getting RT to work was a hassle and there’s something odd about click targets with 5.9 RC1. Despite all that it’s just so much nicer to work with.
Don’t say that! I’m afraid that this is true for me as well, which would be mildly terrible because RT isn’t perfect by a long shot. I’m still holding out hope that I’ll find something even better, or that I can eventually adjust to a more powerful app (which frankly means DT because there appears to be no competition to it anywhere, be it open-source or proprietary).
But yeah, not only do I love RT, it was love at first sight as well, even when I didn’t really understand any part of it yet. Just the way the sliders and number input works, is more comfortable and precise than anything I’ve encountered so far (including DT and Lr).
The “[/quote]” belongs in a new line under the actual quote.
Sorry to cherry-pick one small point out of this interesting discussion, but that might be due to the fact that dt doesn’t apply any sharpening by default - unlike RT which IIRC applies capture sharpening out-of-the-gate (as it were).
That didn’t last long! Seriously though, I can relate to trying different things - I’ve done quite a lot of that in the past. But I seem to have settled on darktable for the time being - took a while to get comfortable, but I think that that very learning curve (and some frustration) ended up resulting in a better understanding/feel for image editing in general. Not sure if that’s just me being optimistic, but I believe it anyway.
I’d agree - but would also emphasise the ‘by default’ bit - it’s really very flexible - but it took me quite a long time to get a grasp on what actual image characteristics/parameters were resulting in what ‘look’.
I always think it’s a bit like music - I’m quite a keen listener, and love closely listening to songs and picking out phrases, or sounds that stand out, but I don’t understand or recognise what chords, progressions, or scales they might actually be using.
In photography, I’m starting to feel that I can start to pick out what kind of tone curve, local contrast etc. might be used to give an image a certain look… if that makes sense…
It didn’t, but not being able to zoom in when cropping/rotating/straightening means that I couldn’t properly perform the very first step of the workflow. It’s just a total dealbreaker imo.
I can remember a time when a graph with a 45-degree line meant nothing to me, and I had no intuitive grasp of its input-output meaning. Now curves are absolutely the most intuitive and simple basic image-manipulation tools to me. Darktable has several — but are they all being left behind in this scene-referred thing?
I have ctrl-+ assigned to curves in gimp. I just have to take my left hand to the ctrl key and reach out my right thumb without taking my hand off the mouse. And it is the first thing I do with every picture.
Aren’t curves the ubiquitous language of adjusting luminescence/RGB levels?
(One thing I really like about gimp is that each tool becomes an independent resizeable window and I can make my adjustments in a decent size box, not a tiny rectangle in a side panel.)
outside of FOSS, LR/PS/Adobe is never going to be an option for me. Partly it’s prejudice, but on my retirement income, the monthly sub is too much. I can splash out one-time payments more easily than commit to such long-term expense. Generally, I will try to avoid the subscription model. Fast becomeing the “ubiquitous language” of picture-processing software economics!
I think it would be more correct to say that DT doesn’t have its own style. It really tries to do as little as possible when first opening a RAW, where all the others apply sharpening, curves and who knows what else.
Don’t know how you do it in Gimp, but in DT tone eq often works well even without masking. And if not, it doesn’t take long to put an oval mask on the face or eyes.
Essentially yes. It’s not that they don’t work, but that the UI is inherently display-referred. Depending on what you’re trying to do, tone eq or color balance are probably what you should use instead.
Yes. I find the tone EQ (for example) much easier to do what I want than curves. Nothing wrong with curves of course, it’s just what I’ve learnt to do what I want with.
They are still present and can be used as long as you don’t need to produce HDR output. In particular, the RGB curves module is very useful if you are accustomed to editing with curves. It’s currently in the wrong place in the pipe, though - you might want to move it past filmic or sigmoid (whichever you use) to avoid clipping off the higher values before the tone mapping process. The RGB curves module works on SDR (bounded) signal so it must clip off anything beyond values 1.
I disagree. The Color Adaptation workflow, and the color preservation in Filmic and Sigmoid have a noticeable look to them that is distinct from other renderings. Of course the same is true for all other raw processors (and necessarily for all processing techniques), so that’s not a criticism.
But you have to make choices when converting 12 stops of dynamic range into an 8-bit JPEG. That’s the nature of the game.
Express was just for Sony when I first came across it, didn’t know they used to do one for Canon. They added a Fuji one and then Nikon after some years.
I would add that the majority of DT renderings that I see have more of an artistic quality to them, and have very little verisimilitude.
With RT this is very different, at least as long as the source image quality is sufficient. Then again, my standard workflow now almost always includes applying the Adobe Standard DCP for my camera in the Color Management module, including the tone curve. This usually gives me what I’m always looking for, which is a perfectly neutral rendering, ideally plausibly appearing as though I’m right there looking at the scene with my own eyes.
In my (admittedly beginner’s) mind, artistic renderings are there to salvage quality images from images with a low-ish technical quality. Which in turn usually just makes me want to go out and re-take the shot, which makes sense because I’m an amateur and not a professional who travels the world to exotic locations that I couldn’t easily revisit.
I see your point. I think that when the magic happens is when you have perfect shot to start with, then a (tastefully) artistic rendering can give it the kind of ‘wow’ that makes a stand out image.
(Not suggesting I am capable of doing this by the way… it’s only a goal as I see it!)
Yes. I’m gonna stick my neck out here and try to reformulate my thoughts along the lines of art history, of which I know woefully little though. I believe that I’m spiritually somewhat close to Stuckism, or at least to what I believe it is about. I’m one of those people who think that achieving formal proficiency should always precede going abstract and conceptual. In other words: imho people should first learn to take proper photos and to make proper images with a high degree of verisimilitude before going “artistic”.
People who only produce abstract things (be it in photography, painting, writing or any other potentially artistic field of human communication) are immediately suspect to me. I’m admittedly simple-minded like that: I always wonder whether they’re just trying to mask a lack of technical skill with pretend-artistic decisions. My ideal for a photographic art gallery/website would be one where a “realistic”-looking rendering is put up side-by-side with an artistic rendering of the same image, so that the artistic decisions become readily visible and up for judgment and debate.
So, since I’m a beginner photographer, it makes sense to me to first try and learn to conservatively take good technical-quality images before liberally applying distancing effects. In yet other words: I believe I may one day start taking more abstract photos that don’t care so much about things like sharpness/focus etc. and I might start applying strong edits to images in order to deliberately achieve specific effects, but not before I’m satisfied that I can also do the formally correct.
So that’s why I prefer RT over DT for the time being, precisely because it doesn’t give pictures a “look” imho. RT can easily make the whole camera apparatus appear like a clean window pane, with seemingly nothing but time and space between your eye and the actual scene you photographed.
What it shows is that to make something intuitive you have to consider what people already know. The proposal that this undermines the concept is baffling to me but I think it’s kind of analogous to the discussions about truth in photography . Where some refuse that social or cultural conventions have any bearing on the issue.
The reality must be that almost no one produces HDR output? The delivery is still fragile and poorly supported right? Then comes the issue of how little photography is viewed on HDR capable devices.
Interesting take. I would consider most “typical” over the top post processing to work in the opposite way of distancing effects. Rather than allowing you to really see the world by making it uncanny, strange, alien (see Berthold Brecht etc.) most post processing completely obscures the world by reducing it to an empty sign.
Very true, but that probably simply comes down to Sturgeon’s law.
Edit: Also, since the “real world” has long since turned into an empty sign, one might argue that terrible post-processing adheres most closely to the world we now inhabit.
I like that philosophy, even though it is not one I agree with.
In my own photography, I found that every photo is a lossy projection. I decide what to include and exclude. But when viewing the picture, we don’t see what’s not included. If a beach ends on an empty stretch, we assume it must continue such, where in reality there might have been a factory, or crowd, or forest right out-of-frame. Then I decide to position myself such that some things are hidden behind things, while others are clearly separated and noticeable. I decide what to focus on, and where the strongest contrasts are, which guides the eye of the viewer if I did my job right. And then I decide what to expose for, intentionally losing some things in darkness or white. The moment of exposure is also relevant. Do I blur movement, or capture an expression in-motion that would normally be obscured? Do I wait for a surprising reaction, or capture a pensive mood?
When all that said is done, what I have created is a fiction. I can choose to use this device to express a mood or situation as I experienced it. Or not. But even if I do, this may not be how others experienced the same moment. My own perception is a projection as well, after all.
I usually try to be true to what I experienced, but then my wife tells me that that’s not at all what she saw.
Post processing, then, is just an extension of this process. To me, anyway. I try to represent the scene as I remember it, teasing out the beauty (or something) I saw in that moment. But nevertheless it’s a work of fiction. I also fundamentally believe in constructivism, i.e. that every one of us truly does live in their own fictional universe that is only loosely tied to a fundamentally unknowable reality. So maybe expressing my own narrative is not so much a distortion of reality, but merely a communication of it.
Seriously though, I can relate to trying different things - I’ve done quite a lot of that in the past. But I seem to have settled on darktable for the time being - took a while to get comfortable, but I think that that very learning curve (and some frustration) ended up resulting in a better understanding/feel for image editing in general. Not sure if that’s just me being optimistic, but I believe it anyway. 
