Here’s something I’ve been struggling with for a while:
I have 2 bracketed photos. 1 is exposed at the nominal reading, the second photos is 1 stop under. When I load each of them in RT, they both look very similar. There appears to be a slight variation in contrast but other than that they look way too similar to be 1 stop apart. The exported TIFFs reflect said similarity.
This makes me think that RT applies some kind of auto-exposure to extract the most tonal data out of every photo. Well, at least in this case this is counterproductive, as I need to take both files to an HDR software.
So, how can I tell RT not to mess with the exposure, or am I missing something here?
When you load the images in RT chances are a default install (without changing anything) will use the Default processing profile for raw files. This Default profile actually has some things setup for you automatically, including Auto Levels for exposure:
You probably don’t want this.
You can set the default profile that gets loaded with raws in the Preferences, and you can set the profile to use for raw photos:
One detail to keep in mind regarding RT profile selection. The preferences dialog features a checkbox that specifies “Use bundled profiles”. However if you modify the input filename when saving an RT output image, the profile will carry the output name, not the input (eg XXXX.RAF is saved as XXXX_rt.jpg, which produces a XXXX_rt.pp3 profile file). In these cases RT will not associate the output profile with the original raw file, and you’ll have to manually load the profile.
