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 
)
Maybe now RT is changing 
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
Yes! Rawtherapee is complex! I have used Rawtherapee for many years, but I have thoughts of changing to something simpler. I am a hobbyist and don’t need all the options now offered. My needs are simple. My hobby is taking photos and not editing photos.
I don’t think RT is too complex in general but something I find too hard is dodging & burning, it’s one of the most basic operation in photography but it’s not so clear how to do it right now. There’s too many options (Color & light, tone equalizer, Dynamic Range & Exposure, … which I am supposed to use?) yet some important missing features; most importantly being able to rotate the spot, and feathering is too complicated to discover.
Personally I’d love a tool called “dodge & burn” with a single slider that just change the exposure (maybe add a tone curve & graduate filter in there) and having controls on the spot itself to rotate it and adjust the feathering.
Rotating the RT-spot is a very “old” request, as well as adding a “polygon” mode to the “elipse” and “rectangle” modes.
These are things that I don’t know how to do, I am not (contrary to appearances) a computer scientist.
These additions require 2 things:
- have a GUI that allows it - I don’t know how to do it at all.
- modify the algorithm which takes into account the deltaE… it’s not simple, but maybe I can get there.
For the “dodge” and “burn”, you will not have the usual techniques like those found in Lightroom, which use brushes, etc. and for good reason (GUI problems)
But a “thing” that I set up from the work of a researcher (with complex maths : not for the user).
Look in Rawpedia
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Local_Adjustments#Dodging_and_Burning
Tools : Soft Light & Original Retinex
Mode complexity : Standard or Advanced…
But, we are no longer quite in the same general subject 
Jacques
I agree. A bit off topic but in addition to Jacques’ example above, it’s possible to simulate dodge and burn by using the L mask in the Color & Light tool as a luminosity mask in conjunction with the Lightness slider. It’s a bit cumbersome though and you can’t draw straight lines in the mask. The diagram at the bottom of the following post shows the curve shapes for the various masks used in Pat David’s original tutorial. https://www.gimpscripts.net/2021/01/ofn-luminosity-masks-ver13.html
Personally I find it easier just to use the Saul Goode script in the GIMP.
To be clear by dodge & burn I just mean local adjustment of exposure, it’s like the most basic thing one could want to do with local adjustments. I think the current spot system with deltaE would be good enough for most cases (no need of brushes), if we could rotate the spot. A slider would do the job.
With all due respect I think there’s value in just learning what you need from a tool (RT or otherwise) and simply using what you know (i.e., ignoring the rest) rather than choosing a tool that offers only what you currently need and nothing more. As you progress at some point you may well need and / or want additional capabilities. If you’ve stayed with a tool offering those (albeit previously unused) capabilities, it’s just a matter of learning an additional technique / aspect, rather than learning an entirely new tool.
Just my thoughts.
Good point!
In other words, RawTherapee is as complex as the User makes it - based on how they use it.
Thanks for the ‘tools’ tip!
If the concern is upping RawTherapee user numbers, I think what would be most helpful would be more tutorials and worked examples. The existing tutorials that various people have put up on YouTube are generally very good, but text-based worked examples would also be helpful (I know jdc has done some of these too). It also seems to me that, even though the pipeline is fixed behind the scenes, there are likely to be some “better” (quicker, more efficient, less back and forth between tools) orders in which tools should be used, but it is not obvious from RawPedia or other sources what those particular editing approaches might be. Is my reading of this what others are saying here too?
I think tutorials on the straightforward and classic modules would indeed expose new users to RT and help with learning but my question would be is there an existing video tutorial to cover something like this and if not who is tackling something like this (see below) and doing it well for perhaps the limited number of users who would ever venture into the full extent of this sort of myriad of controls and adjustments. THe video clip is a scroll with all options exposed and keep in mind that this is just one of several possible tools that you can add to a spot in local adjustments alone…
Kudos for the power this offers but I suspect much of it remains buried for all but a small fraction of the RT users I would imagine… glad to be wrong…
Hello
@xpatUSA
Your intervention clearly shows that it is not obvious
How do I know this exists?
How to activate it?
Can we improve it?
@lstuhl
All comments are relevant.
Some prefer videos (with the language problem), others text (but you have to translate).
Certain subjects are actually little (or poorly) addressed on the pipeline, the order of actions.
In all cases these means of communication (training) require a lot of work. We must make them known (know that they exist). The approach initiated by is @martbetz in the right direction.
Today a support such as Rawpedia is not very appropriate, and its access is limited to a few (rare) people. This is my case, but am I in the best position to talk about it? The cooperation with Wayne @Wayne_Sutton made it possible on the one hand to produce a quality English version, but also to review the content (pedagogy), as well as the ergonomics of the software itself (for example “expanders”, or what to put in " Basic"…).
A migration to another support than Rawpedia should be possible on Github, but what (who, when…) should we do with the current documentation? This will allow for multiple contributions, but it is a lot of work.
@priort
What you mention is not easy to resolve whether in text or video.
The separation “Basic”, “Standard”, “Advanced” was done arbitrarily mainly by me. But on a case-by-case basis, it is quite easy to move a package (for example an Expander), from Advanced to Basic, or vice versa, if a majority wishes. It’s 99% GUI.
I can take the example of “Color & Light”.
Anyone who wants to have access to the “Merge file” module which simulates what Gimp or Photoshop does, must use the “Advanced” mode, I think it is “easy” to change.
Jacques
I’ve seen many people get frustrated, saying that X program is too complex or Y feature is hard to understand. Many times, they could benefit from taking a different approach to using the program.
There’s no shortage of posts on this forum asking how to use a certain feature. Learning something new is a good thing. What happens sometimes, however, is people try and fail to get good results after applying the feature to their photos. Then they become disappointed. The underlying problem is that they start with the tool and try to use the effect to do something nice to the photo. Instead, I recommend doing the reverse. Start with the photo. Think about what you want it to look like. Then figure out the effect needed to achieve that look and find the tool that does it. With this approach, the connection between the tool and the goal is clearer, and you don’t bother with tools that are unnecessary. I don’t mean to say that you should never explore other tools. Feel free to experiment. Just don’t expect the tool to do something good to every image you experiment on.
RawTherapee (and other software) has what you need to follow my recommendation. The tools are grouped into tabs and each tool has a succinct name. Finding a tool that sounds like it does what you need is a straightforward process. RawTherapee also has ways to help you focus on the tools and options you understand (see the original post with excellent points made by Jacques).
I also see many people getting confused over various ways to do similar things. The key to resolving the confusion is to simply pick one way and ignore the others. Why? If you understand the difference between the methods, then clearly you have no confusion. If you don’t understand the difference, then to you, that means there is no practical difference between the methods. Just pick the one that is easiest for you to use. Don’t worry about not knowing how to use the other methods. Over time, you may run into a situation where one way doesn’t work well. That is a reasonable time to try the other methods. If they also gibe bad results, then stop. If they give good results, then you’ve just organically learned a practical difference.
The two main points about using complex programs are
- Start with the goal and find the tool to achieve it. Ignore other tools until they become relevant.
- If you don’t understand the difference between two things, just pick one and don’t worry about it.
As some have stated already, RawTherapee is only as complex as you make it. Make it easy for yourself.
Hello @Lawrence37
As some have stated already, RawTherapee is only as complex as you make it. Make it easy for yourself.
Yep. As a personal “unconventional” example, in the past, I was used to working with Picasa to batch compress my jpeg images (smartphone stuff). It was a fast and easy task. At present, Picasa is no longer developed by Google.
As a consequence, I have started using RawTherapee to do this same task.
In short, I could work with RawTherapee just only to compress these JPEGs without even leveraging its true RAW nature as “therapist”
I think that’s misleading: it’s like scrolling through all the modules in darktable. Don’t forget that in RawTherapee Local Adjustments is not a single tool, but a collection of tools that support local (‘masked’) editing (but can also be used on the whole image). At least if I understand correctly.
Edit: as pointed out below, I did not.
And yes, RT is complex. It was my first raw editor from the freeware (Gábor) era, I have some .pp2 files on my hard disk. I got interested in darktable for several reasons:
- RT showed a crudely downsampled preview that always looked jagged and noisy;
- several tools, maybe more than in the current set, needed 1:1 view;
- my PC was getting old, and darktable added OpenCL at some point (ver. 1.1, November 2012);
- I don’t remember ever finding documentation for some advanced tools, e.g. the CIECAM adjustments. Maybe it was me, maybe it really was missing at the time.
If I now fire up RT, I cannot use any of the more advanced tools. So yes, it is complex.
But honestly, if I was editing in darktable for the first time, would I not be intimidated by some of the modules? Even after 10+ years in darktable, do I understand all the modules, do I use all the controls in them? Of course not. I would assume that both are of about the same complexity.
ART, with its explicit focus on simplification, is different, but even there you have to learn to use the tools. Often the automatically applied settings give a very good image, but if you want to change them, you cannot do so without understanding the tools.
I think RT’s main problem was a lack of visibility, at least in the last two years or so: here, in the forum, we have seen discussions and new developments, Jacques is posting about his improvements and is responding to user feedback, and there are new tutorials, too. But for the general public, who don’t visit pixls.us, there has not much coverage of RT. I really hope that the latest developments (code- and release-wise) will help RT become more visible again. As one of the most important and powerful open-source raw developers, its liveliness (whether it’s the impression that FOSS tools are viable alternatives to commercial software, or actual solutions that directly, via porting, or indirectly, via shared knowledge and ideas, influence other FOSS tools) helps us all.
Probably why I haven’t switched. There is some merit in having the option of more tools available.
That was just one single tool… If I had added all 12 or so and then opened all the options in all of those it would have been much much longer… and of course no one would ever do either of those things it was just to how the sheer depth of options and control…
If you recall the recent discussion around diffuse and sharpen in DT… 8 sliders was considered too much by many and several people wanted to remove or hide 8 or nine sliders in the new color eq module… I was just really showing how daunting it could be at the level of one single local adjustment in RT to explore all the options… If you were to expose every option and within that one tool (and there were a few drop downs with more options) its an exercise just to keep track of what you have changed. I think you can also add more than one tool to a spot and several spots so its extremely flexible but my idea of complicated… If you had enough time you could likely get to a better understanding and just pick out what you need but it takes a lot of time for some tools when you have to view much of it at 1:1 to get feedback on a particular tweak. The good thing is and If I didn’t mention it I meant to is that you can generally develop quite nice images without diving that deeply into all those settings but since they are there they can be tempting :). I think someone said it above, ie that the user will make RT as complicated as they choose to make it. So the answer to is RT complex might not really be yes or no but rather “it can be”
I think that just as with DT the developers will work in the framework that they are comfortable with and that best presents most of the options of a particular tool so as not to limit its potential and flexibility. Given the nature of some of the tools it can’t help but be complex. I suspect if you were to dumb it down too much there would be others that would complain about missing control…
Ah. Sorry. You scrolled through the options, and when I saw the many different subsections, including one for the Blur/Grain & Denoise tool, I thought more (all) tools were active for the demo.
No its a valid comment for sure… and it was not any sort of criticism either. I just find from my own experience that some of the modules are so long and so laden with options that I have two issues trying to learn them. One I am not sure initially what all of the sliders do as there are so many. And two I am often wondering if I am fighting with myself as I work down through and try to make adjustments. I am often not 100% sure what sliders are potentially working with or against other sliders in the module as its hard to keep track of what has been changed and what is the impact on the image.
In many cases I can get much of what I need from the simpler modules so likely the best answer is I shouldn’t be lurking around in those extended options or at least not until I do a lot more reading and take some notes…
Thank you for this evaluation and your participation.
When Ciecam was created in 2012, I created Rawpedia documentation.
This was only intended to make people aware of what it was, and not how to use it.
I described the 3 processes:
- Scene conditions.
- Image adjustments : which takes into account physiological aspects (simultaneous contrast, surround, etc.).
- Viewing conditions.
With Wayne’s help @Wayne_Sutton , and the integration into LA (Local adjustments), we moved to the user side. Simplify the vocabulary (that of research), simplify the GUI, reduce the number of settings.
The documentation has been updated:
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/CIECAM02
I’m not going to (re)describe all the links, but the documentation has been updated for LA.
It’s a bit the same thing for Wavelets…
From work of Ilia Popov and Emil Martinec then in collaboration with Ingo Weirich, wavelet has been enriched considerably for example with things that look like “Diffuse and sharpen”.
It’s a complex tool (I don’t really see how to do it otherwise), but documentation was produced around 2 to 3 years ago, with the help of several collaborators (thanks to them).
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Wavelet_Levels
Same comment for integration in Local Adjustments as for Ciecam.
Retinex also has its documentation.
This absolutely does not solve the problem of their complexity and how to make them known (and perhaps get them used ?).
Those present in LA are “simpler” notably Ciecam.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to the development of these tools and the writing of the documentation.
Jacques