Calma, calma!
We all are in the learning phase!
Our beloved development software(s)
is(are) developed at a very high speed
so it is very tricky to keep up with them.
A good idea for you is to study some of
the tutorials available here, in this forum,
as well as on youtube.
[What is the definition of a good tutorial?
If you learn something from it, then it is good!]
Have fun!
Claes de Lund, Suecia
There is no “magic bullet” and you’re not doing anything “wrong”. Stop trying to compare your result to horribly oversharpened and oversaturated OOC jpegs or the result of some other software combo you yourself have to “admit that it is a might over-cooked”.
If you are happy with OOC jpegs, there is no shame in that and to be honest, for the image you shared which is well exposed and a middle-of-the-road image, the differences might indeed be minimal. It is all a matter of taste and base material.
You are comparing the results of RawTherapee, a raw converter, to those of a pipeline of raw converter + image editor + sharpening plugin. You’re not doing your self any favor by such a lopsided comparison. Try using RT + Gimp + GMIC and see what comes out.
As it stands, there is nothing to advise you except fo to keep playing around with image “pipelines” until you hit the golden combination. You are after a quick fix and those eventually will not help you forward.
Hi Mike. I very much appreciate your insightful and helpful reading of my attempt to learn RT. You are quite in that I should just keep working with RT instead of trying to make “lopsided” comparisons. BTW, good to know that the image used for this thread was “well exposed” as it was just a test image and not meant to have any impact. Of course, I think my main goal is to do as little PP as possible and well exposed image is a good starting point.
Yup, I am having fun. But as a retiree and light photo hobbyist , I keep asking myself why do I spend so much time trying to learn processing software? I’m either a masochist or a never ending student. And, of course, I have my browsers benchmarks full of photo tutorials.
Because you have the time! I’m still working 45-60 hrs a week… So not so much time. 
@flycaster: Matching the ooc jpg might be a good exercise in the beginning. But the fun starts, when you try to do something different. Here, I went for a warmer look, with more details in the shadows and more structure in the plastering of the walls. Maybe in some aspects it is technical inferior to the ooc jpg but it is my interpretation 
.
Well, I started similar like you start now. After a lot of learning I started using the “dynamic profiles”. So I have a profile for both may cameras and for my 4 lenses and a set of iso dependent additional profiles. All these 10 profiles don’t contain a lot of things. The majority of my settings are in the main profile which is always selected as the first profile. It contains a set of settings to my taste, so that I do not need to start each image from the very beginning.
Well, that’s where I’ll be once I decide between my present and RT software. But that won’t happen for a while… I plan on using both my present and RT (basic) until I learn more.
Your try looks good to me. Those wavy lines in the shutters of my RT try that I mentioned show up at 100%. Would like to see your shutters at 100%.
I posted the image at full resolution. Just click two times to get maximum magnification.
Full image, that’s what I thought. But it seems that the forum’s 100% is not the same 100% as when I viewed my OOC jpg in RT. In RT the shutter verticals are much, much larger???
100% should be 100%. I saved all the pixels that I found in the original raw file 
. Download the image and view it in an image viewer. Then you can magnify it to more than 100% to see the details more clearly.
However, keep in mind, that you would normaly not print or display an image like that.
Canon user here. I have to do some things to make a raw image somewhat similliar in sharpening to the canon version:
Regarding sharpening → it will not affect the image when viewed small, it affects only enlarged image (you will not see the effects of it when viewing at 15%). Thats why when sharpening using method Step 2 above (contrast by detail level), you are sharpening the things which will be visible after shrinking the image. Of course you could resize the image and sharpen the small image, as proposed, but this method does work for me - I preffer to have a large image and have the possibility to enlarge my images and the images look good both small and when enlarged. Hope that helps.
One more thing. Do not use RT as a viewer to judge your processing. It is a very poor viewer for pictures. It shows you very poor resolution of your image. The only way is to process in RT and watch your final image in some other software.
BTW - it would be a huge improvement in RT, if it would be possible to watch last processed image in a high-resolution with all the processings as external software would show you (e.g. embedded in windows 10 photo viewer). So for example, I can click “add to queque”, and then I can click “show last processed image”.
Do you know of any other image processing software that does this?
Is this true? How can you develop an imgage when you can not see what you do?
What extra processing shows external software?
Maybe I’m wrong, here are the same size images to compare:
RT screen:
Windows 10 image viewer on processed image from “coverted” folder:
Canon zoombrowser on processed image from “converted” folder:
In my opinion, the second and especially the third image is somewhat crispier …
(processing is: contrast by detail levels, rl deconvolution)
After performing a simple test and showing the three images, I have to roll back my strong opinion. It was subjective and I remembered to use external software to judge.
Now when I compared it (my previous post), I think, that the difference is here, but it is not as strong, as I expected.
So now I regard my “very poor viewer for pictures” opinion as too strong.
If you downscale below 100% (as above), the image viewers might indeed differ because they use different algorithms for rescaling. But that should not be used to judge the actual full scale image.
Thanks for the tip. As I am very new to RT, I can’t comment on your point that RT is a poor image viewer. However, I use Faststone as my viewer as I can compare 4 images at a time; and, I feel that the viewing is a true representative of the image.
