There’s a delicate balance between grouping by functionality and sorting by workflow order.
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Is there any way one can make RT default to lmmse rather than amaze?
Noise at 300 iso? Literally? This really shouldn’t be happening; I’d suggest the emphasis should be on finding out why it is rather than removing the noise in post. It looks to me as if this is correct:
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/2920495#forum-post-37158083
in fact the A900 has NO noise problems:up to 1600 iso : noise can only seen with pixel peeping but not seen in print
…If you’re seeing noise 3 or 4 stops earlier then you need to 1. look at the camera settings 2. check to see if you’re doing something like over-sharpening in post.
RT does have a mildly hostile user interface, but it’s also tremendously effective at what it does and the amount of work it embodies is staggering. I can’t understand how you think that you can write a better interface if you don’t see how to clean RT up - I could certainly design a new and simplified interface for RT in a day. I’m sure its developers could too. I think the reason that they don’t is an understanding that existing users would miss any alternatives they removed. And that most people coming to RT do so from other RAW developers and want to find familiar tools there, which again means providing alternatives.
The only places I’d criticize RT are
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The docs, which are not good. But writing good docs for a RAW developer means explaining a lot of deep stuff for different levels of knowledge and would be a major effort for a professional technical writer.
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Possibly no one has thought to take real advantage of some of the possibilities of a software rather than literal darkroom. Eg it would be nice to be able to place multiple grad filters rather than just one and for the slider to allow them to increase brightness rather than decrease it. But maybe this is a lot more work than I imagine.
…The best way of making a more accessible RT that I can imagine is to take RT and add a simplified mode on top of the current GUI. This would use the existing pipeline and a simplified version of the current GUI with no alternates and the less frequently used options hidden away. This would be a lot, lot less work to write than a new tool and would benefit from RT updates.
That said, I can’t be bothered to write it - too dull, I’m too lazy, and I think people who want ultimate ease of use should be willing to pay for the time they save. Good luck with your project, although I think you’ll find it’s an impossible amount of work for one person in his spare time, especially when you think about maintenance.
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That’s exactly the thing: I believe I can write a better interface than the current RT because I’m not writing RawTherapee again. Filmulator doesn’t need to cater to people who want the “CIE Color Appearance Model 2002” for whatever reason (seriously what is it for and what does it replace?).
Filmulator is not an impossible amount of work for me and my friend because I intentionally limit the scope of the tools it has. If you want more, just pop into RT or GIMP for some post work. It’s not flexible because I, the developer, have no need for flexibility 95% of the time, and so if you’re like me you might enjoy the removal of things you don’t need.
Sorry, that doesn’t make sense. The answer to advanced features cluttering the interface is simple and decades old: extra “advanced” tabs/dialogues/windows for them - possibly ones which only show when “advanced mode” is activated. And if you know which ones to leave out in a new tool then you know which ones to move in RT. You may well be able to write a new tool - it’s your claim that you can write a new tool but that RT can’t be effectively re-interfaced that I dispute. And the wisdom of producing a new tool from scratch rather than re-skinning something that works and has a strong community of developers.
One of the curses of open source is too much diversity for not enough purpose. What you’re doing may seem a great idea now, but if you succeed then the real long term effect will be to waste developers duplicating effort on basic stuff when they could have been deepening a smaller number of apps. You should always think very carefully when starting a new open source project competing with existing ones. In this case I think your efforts, even if successful, would be likely to do more harm than good. A simplified GUI for RT otoh would be an excellent thing.
I didn’t mean to insinuate that RT couldn’t be reskinned effectively just because of the tools. Hiding in advanced dialog boxes or in advanced modes is an option, but doing that isn’t why Filmulator exists.
Filmulator is not just a new interface for a standard raw editor. It’s built around a unique tone mapping algorithm that doesn’t fit well in normal editor workflows, so I made a new editor to house it properly, with a focus on UI.
It happens that the tone mapping eliminates most of the tweaking I used to have to do when I used RawTherapee, so I just jettisoned all of the tools that are not needed anymore.
You say that developer effort is better spent “deepening” other photo apps, but that’s not what I want from other photo apps, so it really isn’t what I myself should spend my time on.
I don’t think different free raw editors are competing. They are just co-existing. And thinking about developers as resources you could throw on existing projects instead of having them write something new is indicating a lack of understanding how open source(*) works. There isn’t a boss who assigns workforce, and for many (me included) making the program itself better isn’t even the goal. They do it for the fun of hacking, solving puzzles and interacting.
(*) or free software. I am not too keen on that distinction.
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Yes, provided your camera has a Bayer sensor. Open a raw file with the default profile you use (for me that’s the neutral profile), then click the Raw tab in the toolbox on the right, open the Demosaicing entry, choose for Method: lmmse. Now save this profile via the Save as button in the Processing profiles entry on top of the toolbox and call it for example my.default.lmmse.pp3.
Open the Preferences window, go to tab Image processing and say that RT must use the my.default.lmmse profile when opening raws.
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See “Sidecar Files - Processing Profiles” and “Creating processing profiles for general use” at RawPedia:
http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/
Note: This post is about RawTherapee and not about the OP’s question on noise handling.
@ump
Some developers like to code new things, some like to fix bugs, some like to work on color algorithms, others like to work on the user interface, some like to document things while others don’t. To someone who understands the algorithm through and through, a “good interface” means something different than what it would to someone who does not understand the algorithm or care for it at all. I do what I can (nag who I can) to make the user interface work correctly and in a way that is clear to the user, but that is not always easy or possible, especially when it involves adding controls to complicated algorithms which are completely new to me and when there is a strong language barrier between the developer(s) who coded the algorithm vs those who think they have a better idea for the UI. The same goes for the documentation - I write it whenever I can, and nag for it when I can’t. It took me many hours to translate the documentation for wavelets from French to English, but even then the result was not helpful to someone who does not speak math or who is not a color expert, so I had to spend more hours making it user-friendly, and after all that work the Wavelet tool still changed a lot and so I would need to spend more time updating it. Having said that, I think RawTherapee’s documentation generally is good. My aim is to document how things work in RT, I have no intention of explaining basic concepts which are not specific to RT - there are countless other websites and Wikipedia for that. If you feel something is lacking or outdated, open an issue on GitHub, one per suggestion, and be specific.
Multiple grad filters - yes we’d like that too, but the engine code does not allow one to stack tools one on the other as the user wishes. We would love this to change, but it would require a massive effort and so far two attempts at doing that have stalled. Things have picked up again now and we have a professional new developer on board, so who knows.
Simplified mode - I am strongly against this, as well as against “advanced” tabs and buttons. The concept of “simple/advanced” means different things to different people. The more you learn, the more becomes simple. As much as I like Hugin, I think its user interface is completely screwed up. In an effort to fix it, it was split into three levels of difficulty; that only screwed it up more. Every single program which offers a “simple” mode ends up doing more harm than good by it. Simple does not mean usable.
My idea is to rather expose sliders and knobs which are generally useful, to hide or automate those which are not, to have good defaults, and to have documentation that makes using them possible for those users who take the time to read it. The Getting Started RawPedia guide is meant to ease new users into the RT workflow, and I will record some screencasts once I get a decent microphone (I can’t stand squeaky screencast videos). If that does’t work for you, try PhotoFlow or darktable, or even digiKam or UFRaw if you want really simple.
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simpler user interface in many cases means “a new concept to handle this” a good or bad example (depending on where you come down) are apps for tablets.
I’ve ‘invented’ a collective noun that fits RawTherapee (and possibly a few others):
A Bewilderment of Buttons
Biff
So, BoB? :]
tralala 20 chars
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A very good and effective method for reducing noise and sharpening is the following. You can do it in your picture editor:
Change the colorspace to CieLab
First reduce noise in the colorchannels a and b, a good average (in Photoshop!) is 8.
After this add unsharp masking to the luminance channel L. Good average is 150 (Photoshop).
Then change the color space to RGB again.
Noise is mostly present in the color channels, the luminance channel is important for sharpness.
The sharpness added this way is a very good basic sharpening. When needed you can always add extra sharpening when needed, p.e. for print.
Photoshop users can find an action for this on this page of PhotoNmagazine.eu (Dutch): http://www.photonmagazine.eu/service-pagina . Look there for the link ‘Photoshop action Noise and Unsharp mask’
And for me the same, English isn’t my native language. 
Or you can use RawTherapee to denoise ab and sharpen L* without the hassle of using Photoshop, selling your soul and manually changing colorspaces 
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Hi Morgan,
The point is that you can do it this way in any program that supports CieLab.
If the program is profile aware (applies to ISO standards) there’s never the need to convert the color space of the importfile to some other working space.
The numbers for Photoshop were given for reference.
Besides, when using programs as tools and not as a kind of religion, you’ll never sell your soul. ;-))))
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You can denoise ab in any program that supports CieLab? Didn’t know that.
Ingo
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