Rawtherapee default image quality

Hi,
I’ve been looking to move away from lightroom and towards linux/open solutions but having a little trouble with raw therapee. Comparing the results to darktable my images have a strong tonal curve with strong crushed blacks, im having trouble removing the tonal curve. I can choose a linear tonal curve but that results in a flat image. Is this the intended behaviour? Camera is a Pentax K-50 and lens is a DA70.

Darktable:

Rawtherapee:
2018-05-28-3678

tonalCurve

Thanks

@Redsith Welcome to the forum!

Take a look at the histogram in your image. See how the shadows don’t reach the zero mark and drop off sharply, and how there is a flat region in the highlights? Adjust the curve so that there are more peaks in the highlights and less in the shadows. The key is to experiment.

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Hi @Redsith, can you share one of the problematic raw files? Thanks!

Hi sure, heres a raw file
2018-05-28-3678.DNG (13.7 MB)

I can tweak the base curve to get better results but it seems odd that i have to tweak every image to remove the contrast before i can start to edit my image.

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@Redsith thanks. By default RawTherapee (from version 5.4, before it was different) applies a tone curve that tries to match the embedded JPEG preview. In your case, the embedded JPEG is a rather “contrasty” B&W image (extracted with dcraw -e):


that’s why you get a high-contrast default rendering. If you don’t like that, here are a couple of things you can do:

  • use a different default processing profile. See the relevant chapters on RawPedia
  • apply a bit of negative contrast (-10 seems to be a good value to get close to darktable’s default)
  • or maybe configure your camera to generate less-contrasty previews by default…

HTH

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Before the Auto-Matched Curve was introduced, RT’s default profile was using the Auto Levels tool. With it, the image looks something like this:

Wow, thats actually a really nice feature, i quite like the bright picture profile on my camera and testing some raw’s using that profile produces some nice results :slight_smile:

Thanks guys

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