All the similar settings and EV etc.
Here is raw file if you interested checking out yourself
P1000786.RW2 (18.7 MB)
Thanks!
Hello, I used other settings for the Noise Reduction filter, both in RawTherapee and ART :
- Mode: Agressive
- Luminance 40
- Detail recovery 50.
Following is a detail at 400% (only fools and programmers use that zoom level 
).
- Without NR
- RT noise reduction
- ART noise reduction
I don’t see a big difference, perhaps RT is slightly cleaner, but only at this extreme zoom level.
In Art there is a details threshold slider that seems also quite effective at dialing in the strength of the effect… and RT seems to have a setting for lightness correction so it might be hard to do a complete 1:1 but I didn’t see too much difference playing back and forth… I did go and add 1.5 EV before starting and I tried to match more the curves… ART starts with a pairing of neutral and linear where as RT default is film like… I set ART to film like and smooth S curve and that seems to be less noisy just by doing that change… but these things are all pretty subjective…
This has been a lesson for me - never attempt lengthy responses when tired!!!
By ‘export out’ I meant export to external editor!!!
This used to be 'target storage>collection; then select the new rasterised image, and select the editor from the lua script options you had already set up.
But now, I uses 'target storage>collection and the new (to me) ‘show in file explorer’ the just drag the TIFF into my external editor.
Either way though, it’s more painful than the RawTherapee/ART method.
Still, apologies to all who were misled by my poor choice of words!
So the part that is “the stupidest export out routine in existence” is one that you’ve already configured and got working and made a video about?
1 Like
CORRECT - that’s why I made the video. Convoluted process by comparison to RT/ART.
1 Like
Hi Andy … there are people who decided to adopt a foss almost like a religion … personally, I don’t see a point in working in everything as you do … I certainly believe that Lr/ACR/PS or CaptureOne could be more powerful and easy to use tools than geekish RT/ART/DT+GIMP but please tell me your opinion on this … the outcome matters, the file that is the representation of your work is what matters the most … Are mentioned proprietary programs able to produce these final products (files with images) to be better than same files created in FOSS programs ?
cheers, ~dan
1 Like
Hi Dan,
I’ve been using Photoshop since before it was called Photoshop! At the time, and for many a year after, there was no such thing as an ‘adobe alternative’…but hopefully you understand why I’ve always used Adobe.
As the Adobe ‘suite’ has grown, the various additions and adaptations to it have been easy to incorporate into my own workflow - which don’t forget, has always been commercial. I am not, and never have been, a hobby photographer, and I get pretty much zero enjoyment out of anything to do with photography…it’s a job, and to be honest, the only one I know.
Over the last few years, an error crept into the basic demosaic algorithm in Lightroom/ACR, due to the inclusion of some sort of pre-sharpening halo - even with all capture sharpening turned off. Most of the time it does not show up or have any detrimental manifestation on images.
But it does show up on edges that span boundaries between extreme high and low frequency detail areas, especially where there is a large colour contrast change. A house roof/chimney against the deep blue sky is a real classic example.
This is easily removed in Photoshop afterwards, but can take a lot of time because it’s tedious.
I came across RawTherapee (v5.3 I think it was) and could not believe it - variable demosaicing and duel demosaicing with NO BLOODY HALOES!
So, every time I had this problem in Lightroom, I just opened the raw file in RT and went from there, back to Photoshop. I then started to explore some of the other facilities in RT, and found it a very useful bit of kit to have access to when needed.
This is when I started doing training videos on RT over on YouTube.
As a working photographer, and as someone who has always processed other photographers images for print exhibitions etc, my workflow end-goal is usually different from that of a hobby photographer. My target output is not a downsized jpeg in the sRGB colour space, but full resolution 16bit TIFF in the ProPhoto colour space. This is then archived, and spawns duplicates for either downsizing for web, or perhaps upsizing for exhibition print.
My attitude to different software packages is quite simple - they are just tools.
A good mechanic has a lot of duplicate spanner sizes, all bent, shaped and profiled differently, for getting at awkwardly placed nuts and bolts: it’s an efficiency thing.
Every photographer has their own fave bit of software, and it’ll come as no surprise to you when I say mine is Photoshop - in my opinion it is the king of all photo software. But it is a RIP, so it has to be fed with a diet of error free pixels.
Lightroom/ACR can usually accommodate that job, but sometimes not, as mentioned earlier.
RawTherapee solves the initial problem. But it is limited by a lack of easy masking and a very steep learning curve - hence I found a market for videos addressing the latter on YouTube.
As for the former, the Adobe-less answer is Darktable - which has masking facilities up the YinYang!
But it’s another steep learning curve - so is another YouTube video category in itself.
As with most folk who make their living in a photography related manner, I am a Mac user.
Darktable was always ‘bad’ on mac, because mac stuff is expensive, and FOSS devs are like me - they never spend money unless they have to!
It was only a couple of years ago that DT came good on all mac OS versions.
ART is, in my opinion of course, all I ever wished RawTherapee could be. However, it’s only very recently - thanks to Alberto and Richard Barber - that it has been made functional on ARM chip Macs - and there is still a ways to go on that score.
But, all of them are still just tools - tools that do the same job, just in different ways; and so they all have a useful place on my system and in my general workflow.
It’s all, for me at least, a question of efficiency/time - so raws will process well in Lr/ACR, some will be easier in RT, some in ART, or some in DT.
I totally understand that my PoV on this subject will be VERY different from that of most people who use a camera!
But the only thing I am a FAN BOY of, is whatever saves me time and effort to get to where I want to get.
Does that answer your question Dan?
12 Likes
Almost. If it had RT’s wavelets I would ditch RT completely.
I’d rather have GIMP’s wavelets; those I can understand.
yes and no, but I understood perfectly to your point … I am pure hobby photographer and moreover with not so huge experience as yours … Also I am 25+ years working as systems engineer and I am Linux guy and absolute opensource enthusiast … And now I am just looking around in this for me a relatively new world and vast world of photography trying to understand how it’s going on here … I am of course driven by desire to have the best possible outcome of my photography work and in the same time I am driven by my holy frantic endeavour to not betray my principles and policies and almost religion in the software realm … And everything of this is even more complicated by the fact, that my wife is graphic designer and we have home at least 15 working Mac computers (from past two decades) and she is using on daily basis a Photoshop (however she’s not normally working with photos - it’s so fun to realize how different her work is with same tool - her other tools, or perhaps even primary tools are InDesign and Illustrator while my tools would be Lr+PS) …
I wanted to hear if foss programs (like DT/RT/ART+GIMP) are capable in the right hands to yield indistinguishable outcome (which is for a photographers a files with images that can be printed or published) …
For instance I have some insight on how Lr and PS works and yes, they are tempting because that they feel smoother for use in many aspects … There are a lot of things to consider, I’ve outlined some above … Additionally I am a father of two beautiful young kids and the time that I can spend with my hobby is very very limited so I don’t want to start from square one (okay, it would be square two or three really) with learning another tool …
My question is obvious - Should I stay or should I go ??
I just wanted to grab my opportunity and ask you because I know from yt that you use primarily Adobe softare and you can compare because you know both worlds … I do not
3 Likes
When my kids were born, I abandoned darktable for Capture One. There just wasn’t enough time left to invest into photo editing. Later, some technical issues pushed me to Lightroom. Now that my kids aren’t babies any more, I’m back wuth Darktable.
I would love to say that I can’t see a difference between my Lightroom, Capture One, and Darktable edits. But the truth is, I can.
Those salmon sunsets are a dead giveaway for Darktable’s filmic. Those haloed horizons and desaturated highlights are Lightroom. The cyan skies and yellow highlights belong to Capture One. Darktable’s Sigmoid highlight rendering is onr of my main reasons for preferring it over Lightroom and Capture One these days.
It goes further of course. Sharpening looks very different in these programs. I very much like Capture One’s approach, and have not been able to fully replicate that in Darktable. Denoising in Lightroom is simply on an entirely different level (post-processing with Topaz or at least Neat helps).
There’s a certain crunchiness to Darktable renders that I can’t seem to shake. Fujifilm film simulations and colors in general have an inimitable look to them. I tend to edit much less boldly in Darktable, for reasons that I can’t explain.
But, the thing is, I could say similar things about the other programs. And it’s not a bad look, just a recognizable one. Perhaps that just means I’m not very good at post processing. Much like photography itself, post processing seems to have an infinite learning curve that has not flattened yet, ten years in.
In terms of workflow, I’ve tweaked and automated my Darktable rather extensively. At this point, I’m no longer much slower in Darktable than I was in Capture One. Lightroom needed a commercial plugin, LrSuperKeys, to approach the same fluidity. But getting my Darktable workflow dialed in like that has taken me several years.
Also note that Darktable requires an order of magnitude more computer power than the others to run smoothly, at least on a high-resolution display (4k).
Which is all to say: if you want to go with one program over another, go for it. What matters is your skill as a user, not the program you use. However, each program does impart its own look to the images as well, and it’d be wise to check if that look is compatible with your vision.
5 Likes
… this is exactly what I didn’t want to hear
Hello @sigsegv111
So do I 
Everyone (myself included) is often looking for the BEST software to produce the “best” images even though photography is also an art, not exact sciences.
At work, we take plenty of macro pictures (mostly plant diseases), on a daily basis, and we try to get them as good as possible.
We are spoiled with plenty of softwares: for photo stacking both commercial (Zerene stacker, Helicon focus) and freeware (Picolay mostly)
As a consequence, for instance, in the past, I was extremely judgemental regarding the images (jpeg) produced by Android smartphones. In my view, their colors were not “natural enough” compared to the images produced by Iphone. This is true, for instance, for the Galaxy smartphoens (from Samsung) where the colour (e.g. the blue of the sky) is over-saturated and not completely faithful.
One day, however, I had an epiphany
In short, some close friends showed me some photos of their kids on the beach. They were extremely happy about the colours of their Android Galaxy phones and were even suggesting that “with a bit more of saturation” these images would be even better…
Do not get me wrong, I am not suggesting that all softwares are equal: far from it!
My personal view is just wath @bastibe proposed:
each program does impart its own look to the images as well, and it’d be wise to check if that look is compatible with your vision.
I tend to shoot fewer, rather than more, images. And I don’t shoot family, so I can take my time on editing. But for whatever reason (surely my incompetence) I’ve always found it extremely difficult to get saturated colors in darktable. I don’t mean over saturated, just brilliant enough, to get that “glow” in places, mostly landscapes.
I’ve never owned (rented?) LR but from videos I’ve seen one thing that hugely attracts me (to it and ACR) is the availability of adjustment brushes. I like the idea of applying adjustments in a true brush-like, cumulative, painterly fashion. No paths, just dabbing a brush here and there. Plus the UI feels more refined.
2 Likes
Well I would also say generalization is not good either…For example to say that the darktable look is a salmon sky is misleading as it occurs from a choice of settings used in the edit. Using a different workflow or the older versions of filmic without the gamut handcuffs used by v6 and v7 will not introduce that salmon type hue preservation. Many people here are aware of the nuances and evolution of the various software discussed on this forum but others new to it might not be… this is drifting quite a bit from RT masking
Hi Dan
It’s simply not as ‘cut and dried’ as that Dan. There are quite a few reasons why that is, but in reality, it all boils down to one simple fact - NO ONE dev app is better all round than any other.
Which one I use is more or less driven by the individual image.
If an image is shot within a couple of stops of base ISO, and has no areas of super bright highlights, or super dark shadows, then from a basic processing PoV, they all do pretty much the same job; give or take.
But when it comes to images that are shot at higher ISO values, things begin to fall apart when using FOSS.
A while back, I did a RawTherapee video https://youtu.be/j2cVxO2bGMo?si=iBletVJIJtS72IuS where I demonstrated RT Wavelet Noise Reduction - it wiped the floor with Lightroom Noise Reduction, and so was the better option.
But that is no longer the case, due to the introduction of Ai Denoise products from Adobe and DXO - and Topaz (which I personally advise everyone steer clear of at the moment).
The difference between the two methods on the same high ISO raw file are like night and day.
This type of noise reduction is NOT the same as either conventional NR, or Wavelet NR in RT. RT/DT and ART can NOT even come close to the noise reduction standards currently set by Lightroom, ACR, or DXO.
In this respect, your big problem is your Linux OS; there are so many ‘flavours’ of latest Linux, commercial TPSDs’ regard Linux as something of a moving goal post.
Like Linux, Mac OS is free, and it comes in one flavour only - so is easy to work in as a dev environment.
Windows is the same, though it’s far from free!
For Mac and PC/Windows users, the ‘noise reduction problem’ can be easily worked around with the purchase of DXO Pure Raw 4 (or one of the other Ai Denoise apps).
The denoised output Linear DNG from the likes of DXO PR4 can be opened in DT/RT/ART and processed as a ‘semi-raw/dng’. You would be astonished at the difference you would see between ‘it’ and any attempt you made processing a 4000ISO raw file in a FOSS dev app.
If you always shoot at or around base ISO, you are always using the maximum dynamic range of your camera. If your camera has a base ISO of 100, then 100-400ISO shots will be fine in any FOSS editor - IMO of course!
With my landscape head on, I shoot at 64ISO, because that is my base ISO and utilises the maximum available dynamic range. But with my wildlife photography hat on, things are very different, and I’m rarely blow 1000ISO, and quite frequently up around 4000 to 8000ISO.
The shot above is Lightroom AiDenoise, but DXO is highly comparable.
Instead of 13 stops of dynamic range, I’m now down at between 7 and 5 stops. So exposure becomes hypercritical, and noise is a constant companion.
99.9% of my photography is done under available light, and the subject/light combo dictates my camera settings, and hence my exposure. Sometimes that requires a shutter speed of 1/5000th sec or even higher on occasion.
So, as you can imagine, the shot dictates what software I need to use. My clients demand big images too.
Taking an 8000ISO raw file into FOSS, and shrinking the output to a web-sized jpeg will help kill off the noise in the image for sure, but I would not be able to fulfil my clients demands.
Sending the image into DXO PR4, and then sending the resultant output from there into FOSS, would help satisfy the large image output demands of clients.
But we all have different requirements, and only you Dan, know how much yours differ from mine!
If I have a very large amount of noise in my image, but I’m seeing no demosaicing artefacts in it when displayed in Lightroom, then I use Lightroom.
If I DO see problems in that respect, then my usual choice is DXO (for denoising) then FOSS. My FOSS choice used to be RawTherapee. This changed to Darktable due to its greater flexibility, and now it’s ART, due to the power of ctl scripting.
But the intermediate DXO step is dependant on OS support, and as far as I know, DXO does not run natively on any iteration of Linux; please correct me if I’m wrong!
If I’m faced with processing a base ISO image, this will be done using Lr and Ps, or ACR and Ps if there are no apparent demosaicing artefacts. But they are visible, than my first port of call is Darktable.
Inside Darktable, this image would be processed up to the point where I thought it was either ready for Photoshop, or indeed ‘done’. Then it would be either sent to Ps, or just saved as a full resolution TIFF, and reimported back into my main Lightroom catalogue for keywording etc.
Your chosen subject, and its illumination, dictate the technicals of your captured shot.
Your desired ‘look’ or finished appearance of the shot dictate the software you use.
The software you use is dictated by your operating system and fiscal budget.
If something in your workflow precludes you from using the very latest technologies available to improve your image-taking possibilities/potential, then it needs to be changed.
Let’s put it this way; if your good lady wife would install Lightroom on her Mac, and you put a few images onto an external drive, and plugged into her computer, especially if those images were above 1000ISO, you would be impressed.
4 Likes
All I find for that is Terrebonne Parish School District.
Third Party Software Developers!
1 Like