Is Rawtherapee complex ?

Software RawTherapee
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Vast question. I’ll come back to that later. (Excuse my bad english)

One reality: a number of users have migrated to other software. Why?

  • Lack of publication activity?
  • Other reasons?
  • But probably also because software “X or Y” is simpler, or more powerful, or more to your liking.

Rawtherapee can have a level of complexity to suit everyone:

  • It’s a reality that corresponds to user demand.
  • Who knows that there’s a “Favorites” option in “Preferences” that lets you choose the tools you want to use?
    image

Who knows that for “Local adjustments”, each tool can have 3 choices of complexity: “Basic” (default), “Standard”, “Advanced” ?

  • For each of these choices, the sections may or may not be different (e.g. masks), and within these sections the possible settings (sliders, checkbox…) may be different.

Who knows that there’s a PR under development for “Local Adjustment” to work in “Global” mode, i.e. without deltaE, without transitions, allowing LA algorithms to be added to “main” mode.

Who knows about all the current PRs, such as the one replacing Dcraw with Libraw?
Who knows …?

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Documentation
Another question, and not the least important: how do you know whether the use of a particular tool, algorithm or tutorial is included in the documentation, or in the forum?

For example, who knows that links to development builds are in Rawpedia?

What is complexity?
Difficult to answer. Here are a few examples to illustrate the point.

Let’s take the example of masks:

  • Someone who has worked in “black and white” with an enlarger will find the “mask” approach normal. This will also be the case for a doctor who sees, uses images in reverse (X-rays, etc.).
  • This is not my case, even though I’ve had an enlarger…and a black-and-white (and color) lab.
  • Hence the emergence of “LA” with the deltaE principle - which doesn’t mean I haven’t added masks in response to requests.

It also depends on one’s scientific culture - the comments of some users bear witness to this.

It’s also clear that tools such as Laplacian, Fourier transform, Wavelets and matrix calculations can frighten the average user. Nevertheless, for some, the explanations are insufficient.

And then there are habits. I use a certain slider because I’ve used it in another program and it works. Why look for something else?

So RT has some (very) complex tools and some simple ones. It’s up to us - the whole RT team - to advance knowledge, ergonomics and communication.

The important thing in many cases is that you are satisfied with the result.

Jacques

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I think this is the most likely reason, particularly the last one – at least for me. I started on Raw Therapee, went to darktable and have now settled on ART for more than a year. So I guess it could be true in a relative sense that I kind of returned to Raw Therapee, albeit in the (slowly diverging) form of ART.

Why?

  • At the time Raw Therapee didn’t fully support my Canon CR3 raw files and their metadata

  • I make heavy use local edits and while the spot-oriented masking paradigm in RT is powerful, I found the dt / ART style of masking more to my liking. In fact, I’d love to see even more “natural” brush- / painting-oriented masking in addition to the other approaches.

  • I have to admit when I first got a whiff of darktable’s scene-referred editing I (incorrectly IMO*) thought that if I didn’t “go there” I’d be missing out on where editing is headed, i.e., FOMO. I don’t any longer think that’s strictly true, but my view is certainly not any kind of criticism, evaluation not even commentary of any product’s approach. It’s just the way it looks to me.* I continue to see good (and bad, FWIW) images from lots of tools.

  • I had never really tried ART but for whatever reason when I first did, I got better / easier results “out of the box” than I did with darktable. I’m 1,000% certain that’s due to my lack of skill in darktable, but the more I played with ART the more I liked it.

* I’m not the brightest bulb ever, so I can easily be confused. :slight_smile:

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Hello @jdc

Just a personal guess…

As regards the complexity of RawTherapee I suppose it is a “relative” problem because you are not forced or supposed to know all its options :slight_smile:
It is entirely you choice…
Usually, this applies to every professional software.

In the long past, I have read a report which showed that a typical user of Microsoft Excel only knows 10-20% of its features. Most of all, this user is not often even aware of this lack of knowledge because this 10-20% is already enough to accomplish all his daily tasks. The Office current “Ribbon interface” was created by Microsoft, purposely, to put most tools directly on the Interface, just in front of the user; previously these options were hidden in sub-menus.

Personally, I am a RawTherapee user since its very inception on Windows when it was still a freeware and I only master a very small amount of its features. For me, it is not something shameful. On the contrary, If needed, I know that in the future, there are tons of options waiting to be discovered :slight_smile:

The documentation is very important but the users who really read the entire manuals (whenever it is available) are generally a small percentage. Especially nowdays, with Google at your fingerprints…

As regards darktable, I suppose, its today’s success is due to the wide and often unique array of features available with this software: Masks with brushes, Maps, GPU support, advanced filtering of pictures, Midi support, Liquify tool, scene referred workflow available, advanced lua scripting, tethering (partially on Linux), watermarks etc etc
A very important factor is also the very astonishing work of its developers. If you take a look at github all issues are always taken into acccount (at least with a reply) in a very short time. Also both its bug-fixing rate and pull-requests is mind-boggling. Congratulations to them…

In conclusion, since RawTherapee, darktable, ART are all based on GTK3 and written with “similar” languages (C, C++) I have often seen some features ported to one software to another. E.g. LibRaw is currently being ported to RawTherapee and this occurs also thanks to the previous coding within ART (A. Griggio).
I am 100% persuaded it is a good to have this diversity among open source softwares. Both for users and programmers.

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For me, the first point of interest is:

  • What is this tool for?
  • When do I use it (instead of another similar one)?
  • How do I use it?

At this moment I don’t care about e.g. Laplace or Fourier (the last time I heard of these was at the university, a long long time ago).
A sufficient “how to” is the first step to get used to a program.
That doesn’t mean this information should not be provided, but perhaps at the end of the description.

Writing a good documentation needs as long as writing the code, I know. And noone likes to write documentation (myself included :wink: ). But one of the first things users ask for is the documentation, so do I for each sw I want to use.
(And if there is one, they don’t look at it and you’re thinking R.T.F.M.!)

I know, it’s a hell of a work to have this documentation in seven languages, but…
Sometimes it is not easy to understand technical documents if these are not in your native language; and then you don’t know, which description in which language is the most actual one, e.g. colour management in german is dated 2017-03-19. And I’m sure, there are enough people who don’t or rarely speak a foreign language.

I thought about translating the docs into german, at least for myself - but, provided with necessary information and checks: why not publish it?

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This last sentence is most important to me. Complexity comes after. If the results are not satisfactory, it makes no difference. IMO RT and DT give me mostly good/great results. I use another raw editor that most never heard of called Lightzone. It is clearly the least complex, offering fewer tools, albeit you can get good/great results with that software as well. It is built around the Ansel Adams zone system, but I digress.

The actual answer of RT being to complex or not is yes. Too often I have to go to Rawpedia for the advanced features due to limited/confusing help popup instructions. For this reason, I stick to the basics most of the time but am still happy with the results.

If I have to spend half an hour on an image to save it, it’s probably not worth saving to begin with.

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Digital image creation is a very complex mechanism. What has evolved over time in all supporting software is the abstraction of all that into a chain of tools with some level of “cause-and-effect” - oriented controls, where the user can readily see the effect of changes made with the controls. Over time, doesn’t matter what’s under the hood if the user understands, “if I slide this thing, image gets brighter”… and such.

Where that breaks down is when the cause-effect definition is broken by some corner case. Well, the predominant case for that isn’t really a corner case in my observation, mostly to do with high-dynamic range captures. Then, you’re either futzing with inpaint tools (inpaint-what the hell is that?) to recreate some semblance of highlights, or any number of tone curve-based tools to lift the shadows from oblivion, or both. Presented with that for the first time, you’re now into rabbit-hole land, about to dig into the tools to figure out what they really do, or abandon the software for something you think might be simpler.

To be clear, I don’t understand the full digital imaging thing by a longshot. More of a “mechanic’s understanding”, I can cobble stuff together to get the result I want, but in most cases I use stuff others have built or written. The two mechanic’s things I think are useful in grokking the majority of the raw toolchain are tone curves and gamut transforms; there’s a lot of math in each, but you really don’t need to master it to understand essential mechanism.

Sooo, I think instead of “Is Rawtherapee complex?”, a better question might be “Does RawTherapee provide decent user abstractions?” IMHO, YMMV, and all that…

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I actually thought RawTherapee’s strength was that it had a very intuitive GUI for basic day to day edits, especially compared to darktable. I personally became devoted to darktable because of the incredible drawn and parametric masks that allowed me to easily do localised adjustments in nearly all the modules, at least all that needed them because who would want localised demosaicing? Darktable has a very proactive team of developers that interact with users to keep the software improving. I install and exclusively use a new weekly update each week of the developers latest version. RawTherapee has slower development but it is happening. I applaud the incredible efforts of Alberto for maintaining and developing a fork of RawTherapee called ART. Great job.

Now the caveat for me is that I started my photography over 53 years ago by developing BW pictures on a contact printer, I then went on to have a career as a photographer and had a professional processing lab so for me the mask approach is not only normal but logical. Hmm… I am also now employed in medical research and I look at histograms and dot plots each day to analyse data so abstraction is my world.

To be honest, I am unsure of what or why the OP is really asking here. Is the OP a RT developer wondering why people choose alternative programs such as Darktable or Lightroom? If that is the question then you have my answer above. It is all about the masks and everything else is a bonus.

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Yes. He’s one of the original RT team as I understand it with a vast knowledge of its workings. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m still thinking about my favourites in software and the reasons for those.

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I’d consider removing “in many cases” from that sentence. If you aren’t satisfied with the result, you aren’t happy in general!

I always have RT, ART and dt available on my system, and like all of them. My favorite is often whichever one I have used most often recently, since the tools are fresh in my mind. I’m very skilled at forgetting things, so I really appreciate darktable’s direct access to the documentation for a tool right in the UI.

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I don’t mind saying that I have the utmost respect and admiration for @jdc (Jacques) – not just for his outstanding contributions to RT, but also because he strikes me as an extremely inspiring individual.

I’ve never considered RT ‘too complex,’ but then it was the software I cut my teeth on; as such anything else just seems ‘too basic’ for my needs (the bit that I find ‘too complex’ impossible is getting a shot I’m happy with in the first place :smile:).

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I like your way of putting it.
For me, when I started getting interested in photography again after a few years ‘off’, I initially used my old copy of Ps Elements. But I’d never particularly enjoyed editing in Ps, and Elements Camera Raw was fairly basic. But I didn’t really know what I was missing.

Then I moved to Linux, and I couldn’t run Ps, so looked for budget (i.e. free!) and Linux-friendly alternatives.

I think I tried darktable, and gave up in disgust at the flat out-of-the-box results. (hard to believe now :sweat_smile:)

So I tried RawTherapee. That was better, I got a decent looking image, to start with, but I found I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my photos… personal style? How do you make one of those?
I was basically moving sliders at random, with very mixed results. And I found it complex, just in the sense of what to use for what.

I went back to shooting jpeg for a while. But somewhere along the way I found this forum, and liked the discussions happening on here. I found the darktable manual, some tutorials, and liked the principle of the structured nature of the scene-referred workflow.

[edit] I think it was finding some film emulation LUTs that sent me back to darktable for some reason. Not sure why… RT is just as good if not better at using those]

In hindsight, I think why I liked it was that I had no idea what I was aiming for, and the classic darktable scene-referred set up (and exposed but (mostly) fixed pipeline) kind of gave me a track to run on. I had a lot of fun (and some frustration) teaching myself slowly how to get jpeg-like results, then better-than-jpeg results.

I’ve tried RT again since then, and have used it successfully. But to me it does feel a little impenetrable, coming from my hard-won darktable experience. It’s not always clear to me what does what, how tools interact, (I do like the clear pipeline principle in darktable) and even what tool should be used to get a certain effect.

To be clear, I’m not at all suggesting that any of this is an RT issue, it’s just different to what I’m comfortable with.
And maybe I’ve moved on (in my mind) from having fun working out how stuff works, towards using that knowledge to improve my pics.

I think there’s an element of chance in all this, in terms of what I find myself using!

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For sure RT warns you by grouping some crazy heavy modules in the advanced tab and gives advanced layout/options within the modules but they can seem endless and it might be hard unless you are really skilled to actually know where you are taking your image. Contrast by details is in the details tab, the wavelet module of advanced and the local editing tab where it looks a bit different. I think finding a way to hold on to features that are needed and cut down on some potential redundancy might help with the slider overload…

I have more experience with DT than RT and I just tried the recent RT release… it seems really quite fast given I believe its still all on CPU and not using a GPU… even scrolling panning and zooming don’t have the screen artifacts that you see in DT with is sort of staged update of the screen. Also it has a nice support for color management options. File exports also seem quite fast. I tried it on several images and found that I could often get a nice image by just using default tone mapping enabled and the auto levels with or often without the automatched tone curve… Some tone eq maybe if needed and sharpening and denoise and some very nice colorful attractive images could be had with very little effort…

But man…wading through the stuff in the advanced tab is a load and sometimes I feel like I am going in circles with all the potential adjustments… maybe some more reading and notes might help… the good thing it would seem is that you can get some really nice results without venturing there unless you are brave :slight_smile:

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Yep. I think with more research, watching some tutorials, etc. I’d get a lot more at home with it.
And darktable needed that too, for me.

@jdc mentioned some customization options I wasn’t aware of either.

I think it must be down to personal approach to some extent too.

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I think you mentioned some good points about knowing the pipeline and having some video content to explain things …for example if you were going to use the retinex module would you bother to do any work on shadows and highlights or tone eq or whatever and then go on to use that or would you do some work in retinex first and see where you land and then go to other tools to tweak the image… I guess in short getting a handle on how best not to fight with yourself when editing and to come up with a logical order. Same for wavelets… would you do some work there first and then back to the basic adjustments for say denoise… or denoise first and then do wavelets denoise or only use one of the two … getting that sort of background I think would make it easier to make decisions about how and when to use which tools…

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Thank you all for your contributions.

I didn’t expect so much.

Yes, I am one of RT’s developers, probably the oldest (since 2011).

I could have put another title as suggested, or other content. I’m not trying to say that RT is better or worse. Simply its architecture, its content are partly (largely) based on its history, its origin (2006 - imagined by a single man Gábor Horváth).

I simply wish to move the project forward as well in:

  • its content (algorithms, brushes and clipping, etc.);
  • the graphical interface, the documentation and its access;
  • communication through various media;
  • group work, in particular attracting new developers (I am no longer young), or new contributors, but also all those who wish to contribute their passion (translation, tutorials, website, etc.)

Everything you just wrote:

  • clearly shows the differences in points of view and approaches (and this is normal);
  • initiates the vision of an improvement project.

Thank you all.

Of course, it is possible to continue to make contributions and exchanges.

jacques

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Yeah. RawTherapee tries, hard, in its advanced modules, to solve all possible problems (in essence, color correction stuff) with your pictures. Consequently, there are huge amount of options available in this part.
Most commercial software (e.g. Lightroom) are now relying on AI (artificial intelligence) to do this heavy-lifting (e.g. for inpainting, denoising, sharpening etc).

As regards RawTherapee it is mostly a “phylosophical choice” (I mean, not limiting che options available to the bare minimun, to “please” the new-comers) BUT this outcome also depends massively on the available manpower (programmers) to improve the software itself over the years.
With open source software, as you know, this team is usually veeery small and subject to change over the years :slight_smile:

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For me, the whole business of processing raw images is complex, irrespective of the software. There are the technical aspects relating to image quality and knowing what to look out for, as well the aesthetic aspects, which require a good understanding of colour, composition etc… As a beginner, trying to put all that together along with trying to understand the software was a bit like trying to learn how to write and learning how to use a word processor at the same time. Focusing on the processing software trying to find the ‘best’ solution was a mistake in my case so now I try to stick with one tool and learn how to use it well despite any shortcomings (perceived or otherwise). I’ve still got a long way to go.

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Hello @Wayne_Sutton

I try to stick with one tool and learn how to use it well despite any shortcomings (perceived or otherwise). I’ve still got a long way to go.

I appreciate a lot your comment

A long time ago, I was studying a tech book about the SQL language and the PostgreSQL database. In its preface there was this sentence:
“It takes only a few days to learn the basic of the language but a whole life-time to master it”
I suppose it applies to all professional softwares.

Personally, just to name one, I deem darktable complicated to work with but it is really so?
Yep. probably. But I suppose this is mostly due to the fact that, as an end-user, I am far too used at working with RawTherapee and its interface. Therefore, I would (wrongly) expect the same workflow with darktable as well. This “request”, of mine, does NOT make any sense, of course :slight_smile:

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I was a Ratherapee user, and now I’m an ART user. I switched to ART in 2020, when Alberto just implemented spot removal, and some local editing.
I switched because it seemed to me that the development of Rawtherapee was proceeding slowly (or stalled), with a lot of talking and discussion about what, how and if.
Alberto was very fast, implemented local editing, masks, brush masks, complete support for CR3, all this months (or years) before RT team.
Yes, I know that ART is a one-man-band, it’s simpler to take decision, but, in any case, I had the impression that Alberto got the software off the ground.
He is also very clear: if you ask for a feature, his answer is YES or NO. If YES, in two days you will get the feature. If NO, you’ll never get it.
I think RT team lacks a BDFL (or maybe there is, but he’s not too Dictator :smile: )
Maybe now RT is changing :slight_smile:

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@alvamatik

You are probably (partly) right. Rawtherapee experienced “logistical” problems until very recently.
But I think that’s the past now.

My approach (I am not alone, but it was me who launched this post) is to reconstitute a team, to (re)understand the logic of the system.

Having worked a lot on human factors, “habits” are essential in everyday life (and of course even more so) in the use of software. We forget very quickly, and automatic learning procedures disappear.

If you are interested, you can look at the work of the Danish Jens Rasmussen.

Jacques

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