Having spent the last few hours editing images with RawTherapee, I came upon an image that I felt needed cropping. I opened the Crop Tool, drew my ‘box’, saved the image, then re-opened it to find that the image had not really changed. The entire image was still visible with my crop box shown. I looked online for an answer as to why this was, and the response told me that saving an image in RT does not produce a viewable image because of RT’s non-destructive nature. That also means that, in order for any of the edits to the many images I’ve edited, I will have to re-open each of them and export them (I presume to some new, slightly altered filename), or perhaps use ‘save as’ with the same name since my original files are Sony ARW raw files, and I am saving the edited images as tifs.
I suppose I cannot snort too much steam at the RT application. More upfront investigation on my part would have disclosed this operational feature of RT, but it is a totally new experience in my case. The source files had an ARW file extension, and I was saving as TIF, so why would RT “protect” me from destruction when I was not overwriting the original file. I would have thought changing the file extension would signal to RT that it was not overighting the original file. Will saving to a different filename overcome this non-destructive issue?
I am liking RT very much, but I little “niggles” like this in software irritate me. It’s not the end of the world, of course. I will backtrack and open/extract each of my edited images to overcome this little problem. Saving an ARW file to a TIF should not be construed as overwriting, IMHO. Am I missing something?
Thanks in advance for any replies.
Carusoswi