Basically I would love to learn how to reach the result of LightRoom. So far my attempts at RawTherapee failed from quite a margin.
I would prefer a simple method but with a little worse result, as I won’t have enough time and experience for sophisticated methods.
I don’t have LR or any Adobe software so I don’t have the DCP. I used the curve to get the tones into the same ballpark, but there are still differences, as you saw in the background - the background in the RT version is significantly brighter than in the LR version. This is important - making darks darker kills off significant amounts of noise, so you cannot compare LR to RT if one is dropping the dark tones and the other is not. If you get the DCP for your camera there’s a high chance that it will make both programs treat the tones in a similar way.
@Jessie take a look at her scarf in the crop you posted. In LR’s version the scarf is clipped black. Do the same in RT, use a curve to lower the dark tones, and straight away you have less noise to deal with. Then remove noise without overdoing it following the steps detailed in RawPedia Noise Reduction - RawPedia
This PP3 is based on my previous one, I just lowered the dark tones, enabled auto chroma NR and chromatic aberration auto-correction in the “Raw” tab, and tweaked the luminance NR sliders. SAM_1680.SRW.pp3 (9.3 KB)
I have never used LR, but has got the impression, that its default camera profile is Adobe Standard. If you looking for that, just follow these tips to get it (and much more):
[quote=“Jessie, post:25, topic:2887”]
We are now much closer to LightRoom, even if LightRoom is still (IMHO) really better (especially on the first face with the black scarf).
[/quote]It looks like there is much more noise reduction on the LR samples. For example, look at the teeth in the second example. They’ve become skin colored because the chroma channel was essentially nuked.
Im no RT expert but the way I would do this using RT would be with the wavelets.
Another thing that might bite you on the luma side is sharpening. Make sure the threshold is set high enough, or it’s going to bring out all of that noise.
It is the only noise reduction tool I use in Rawtherapee.
Slightly off topic , Darktable is incredible for noise removal. I just enable the noise reduction for Camera and ISO and set it to wavelet. I never see any noise in Darktable
RawTherapee has some advanced features that are hard to understand, but can be extremely helpful in solving this problem.
Under the Details tab, the bulk of my noise reduction is under the Noise Reduction using curves for both luminance and chrominance.
Targeting higher levels of noise reduction for the nearly black levels for luminance NR and low chominance levels for chrominance NR are the keys for me and my camera.
The two controls seem to get the job done pretty well. However, the way to apply this to all images is a little rough. I have a PP3 generator i created for myself. I understand there is one that someone made which can help you every time you open an image to change these (and other) parameters when opening a file based on the camera, lens, ISO, shutter speed, etc. The key I have found for each of these is to adjust the Luminance - Detail and the Chrominance - Master values based on the ISO for my D5100. Hopefully you can find a similar relationship for your camera.
When it comes to the people example, my method produces more noise than the examples above, however, I like the result better myself. However, I fiddled with the curve and got a reasonable result.
I may really be a matter of taste, but I find your result really less optimal than the one that I obtained with LightRoom.
Thanks for the attempt and the explanation though !
I found the LightRoom DCP profiles here:
drive_c/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.7.1/Resources/CameraProfiles/Adobe Standard
Here is the file for my camera:
Indeed I loaded the DCP tone curve in RawTherapee and the color seems to be much similar to LightRoom now.
However there is no improvement on the noise reduction.
As usual LT on the left and RT on the right.
From what I see at a quick glance at the crops above - you need to cut down on luminance NR a notch, and push down those blacks a bit from exposure panel by some 15% (increase black slider value)
[quote=“Jessie, post:32, topic:2887”]
I came to Rawtherapee because I was really underwhelmed by Darktable noise reduction and color rendering.
[/quote]With the correct profile you should be able to get ‘correct’ colors with darktable.
I’d say the noise reduction algorithms in darktable are very capable as well, especially if you can use the profiled denoising. That does not seem to be available for the NX1, but there is nothing stopping you from adding it yourself.
This is a quick whack with DT:
IMO comparable to the LR result noise wise.
