I’m considering migrating away from LR and have just discovered RawTherapee. Has anyone else tried this? Is it possible to transfer images with LR edits? Any advice appreciated.
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Hi, welcome to the forum!
No app is going to transfer over your LR edits, sorry.
I dont use RT, but it is likely the same answer as darktable. LR modules and edits are proprietary to them and they dont share their code. darktable attempted to reverse engineer some of the edits but the code is not maintained. Tags, ratings and other common fields might transfer via sidecars.
My suggestion, to go LR and export all of your edits into a common format (eg. jpg, tiff) at full resolution and high quality. Back up all of your images.
If you ever need to go back to that one image from 2019, import it to RT or dt or any software and do the edits starting from scratch. You likely will get better results than what you did 6yr ago and save more time via just editing that one image.
Personally, Ive gone back thru a few old folders I had with dt edits, I deleted the edits and started over and exported again. Using new modules plus the new knowledge I learned makes a drastic difference.
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Thanks for your input - good to know it’s not a simple process.
The issue is the edits:
an application cannot know the details of each processing step other applications use (often those details are not published, and even if they were, it would take a lot of time to keep up with changes for all relevant applications). And without those details, just knowing which parameters were used is not helpful…
Metadata should be transferable through sidecars, although you still may have some issues with the exact tags used (Adobe’s tags should be fairly commonly understood, though).
So I’d say follow @g-man’s advice and in addition make sure you have sidecars for all images you want to import in rawtherapee (or any other program, for that matter).
It’s simple enough, actually. You can’t bring your edits over, except as finished exports. Metadata shouldn’t be a problem, however, as long as you make sure to have LR write it to XMP sidecars.
RawTherapee isn’t very advanced when it comes to file management, so you may want to use digiKam for that. Or maybe you can keep using the LR library, which I believe continues working when you stop paying.
Welcome to the forum. I am a former LR user. I have discovered RawTherapee, Darktable, and ART (a fork of Rawtherapee) and I am not going back to LR or any other paid editor. These are all excellent alternatives to LR without the subscription. I would recommend trying all three of these free programs and deciding which you like best. For me I settled on Darktable because of the excellent localised masking abilities with drawn and parametric masks, but RT and ART are also excellent choices.
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Hello.
A few years ago, I looked at the database, the Lightroom catalog, trying to understand the photographic processing data. This is incomprehensible to the photographer, even an expert in development. We should understand the code used by Lightroom, I’m not sure we can develop under another software from this.