Processing Profiles for landscapes, portraits, astro, seascapes, etc.

I’ve been watching tutorial videos and it’s said that what works for one type of photo doesn’t necessarily work for another type of photo. Would it be a good idea to have Processing Profiles for common types of photos? I’m not very good at editing so would find it useful if there were some profiles for RawTherapee to use as a starting point.

I watch Andy Astbury’s RT tutorial and he said that one workflow for a image doesn’t necessarily apply to another image. I think that’s because different images has different kind of noises, exposure, etc. But generally you can custom a profile to make your life easier, no matter what kind of images you’re processing, like you can enable Lab Adjustments, HSV Equalizer, Noise Reduction by default; change the curve’s type to your favorite one; change default demosaicing algorithm to RCD to speed up processing a little bit, and so on. That kind of profile can be of help for most kind of images, I think.

Have a look at the documentation Creating processing profiles for general use - RawPedia

I think there’s merit to the idea, but I’m not finding a way to do it without creating a large collection of such profiles, and spending more time figuring out which one to use…

I shoot (mostly) underexposed, letting my camera’s highlight-weighted matrix metering do it’s thing. Doing this, I almost never blow highlights; when I do, it’s usually light sources or clouds and the librtprocess highlight recovery routine works quite well to fill in the blotches wtih some detail. But as a result, most of my exposures require some lifting of shadows, and it varies from scene-to-scene. I recently shot a wedding for a friend of my daughter, 600 images from three cameras, and I had to spend a few hours going through each batch of shots from given scenes. I’ve become quite adept with my wonky filmic’s four parameters, getting the right amount of toe, slope, and rolloff.

What I did to my software that’s really helped with this is to make one mode of my batch processing an “apply the current processing”. So, I open one of the images of a collection, process it to taste, then delete the other JPEGs of the group and kick off the batch command. It collects the toolchain for the currently open image, and the command line tool applies the new processing to make the missing JPEGs.

For the wedding photos, I went back and reviewed the processing, but I couldn’t find any patterns that would warrant collection into a named profile. I think that’s the consequence of any sort of ETTR-oriented capture: I can divine no good heuristics for characterizing the processing required…

Just wait until we release DeepAITherapee that can see what type of scene you shot and apply a specific profile for that :wink:

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In the end for sure I think people could share some info, profiles, or tips but it might become just like commercial software with a myriad of looks, categorized as “landscape” and then you have 15 choices…you might land on one. I often find that those rarely offer a complete solution and for me they actually can be confusing. Often some part of the image is nicely modified and others are not. One person’s idea of nice green foliage can be neon green to another person so its hard I think to do in a way that is really widely applicable. THe best presets will be the ones you arrive on after many iterations of trial and error. Maybe if you throw out a few sample images into the play raw forum you can gather enough tips and looks to form your standard set of profiles that really work for you?? I’m sure you will get better feedback than this so hang tight…

You also have the RT Film Simulation Collection. There you can find simulations of films that were specifically created for e.g. portrait (Kodak Portra, Fuji Astia etc), which make nice skin tones if the white balance is correct, or landscape (Fuji Velvia) and so on.

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