Have you tried range mask in Lightroom ?
I’m just a hobbyist , but the pro use range mask a lot - then do some adjustment in photoshop - and use plugins like Lumenzia , which is very powerful.
I partly agree , NR in RT is at least as good , but the pros are just using plugins like Topaz denoise or Topaz AI Clear.
It is difficult to compare apples to apples if the white balance is noticbly off. Your RT version has a blue cast. It is also well known that LR does a bunch of stuff in its “default” processing that RT does not do.
Thanks for the link. It seems the file is not public though – at least, I am not able to access it. Can you upload to filebin perhaps? (or make sure people the permissions are correct…).
Thanks!
Does it work now ?
Downloading the file worked.
There’s an imbalance between foss and commercial software for some simple reasons. One of them is:
Foss contributors work for free, are not willing to purchase a license of a commercial product just to compare (or even can not compare because they are using a OS, where the commercial product is not supported), while commercials can compare easily because foss is free. At this point the users (the community) join the game as there are some which have access to commercial products and are able to compare. I appreciate that, as it reduces the imbalance a bit.
How many people on Github is working with RawTherapee ?
You ask about the number of developers? On dev branch there are 5 developers, add two for newlocallab branch. Not to forget the ones which make builds and a bunch of people which test the new stuff.
Compared to more than 19 000 working in Adobe. I think they have about 50 programs or more , but I guess a few hundred ( or more ) is developing Photoshop/Lightroom.
Here is my take with the uploaded RAW file. Finding the correct WB is not always so easy , but I try to find something grey or neutral.
pentax_k3.RT6.jpg.out.pp3 (11.6 KB)I got almost exact the same picture in Lightroom.
manpower is definitely important, but that’s not the only difference, and perhaps not even the most important one.
the projects have radically different goals. for Adobe, I’d guess they want to get the most successful commercial product out there.
for RT, first of all there is no equivalent of Adobe, in the sense there’s no central organisation, it’s just a bunch of people. that most likely have different goals. when I was actively working on RT, my goals were, in order:
I am very happy that I met (at least) more than 50% of them 
so, the bottom line is: the answer to questions like “why doesn’t it work like that?” or “why doesn’t it have feature X?” is often as simple as “because nobody cared enough”…
Hi,
I had a look at the xmp sidecar embedded in your lightroom jpeg, which I could extract with exiftool. It seems to show many more tweaks, not just shadows/highlights (including noise reduction, WB, vibrance, and a few local adjustments if I read it correcly). Do you confirm?
Here’s the extracted xmp: P1000484.xmp (21.9 KB)
That seems correct.
I pressed the Auto button - then Lightroom did a lot of adjustment , as showed here
I finished with 2 local adjustment
Here is one of the mask showed in red
In fact Lightroom ( Auto) did 90% of the job by itself …
One thing I have found is often times, in Rawtherapee, when using shadow lifting or other tonal compression, is you need to balance it out with a contrast curve and add more contrast, and maybe a little bit of wavelet clarity if things still look flat. Afterwards the Rawtherapee result is on par or better than the Lightroom result (depends on subjective preference which is better). Point is both are pretty close in terms of managing high contrast scenes, once you have more experience with Rawtherapee.
Sorry to butt in… But…
What is: wavelet clarity?
I use the RT 5.5 appimage and I can’t find it.
Thanks
Syv
In the wavelets tab, use the contrast tool.
There’s no clarity slider in RT. You can approach the effect of LR’s clarity slider using a combination of tools such as wavelet (contrast, edge sharpness, residual local contrast) and local contrast.
Here’s a pp3 I use with those tools (and then I adjust the strength of wavelets, and contrast for the coarse level):
clarity.pp3 (2.3 KB)
I misspoke, I was specifically referring to the wavelet contrast sliders.
