Months back, I remember a way in RT to darken, lighten, blur, and desaturate an area in an image. But I can’t find a way to do it any more. It was a very useful tool. Perhaps now hidden in plain sight?
It was similar to how Transform->Vignetting Correction works but you could select the area/radium with the mouse and darken, lighten, blur, desaturate the selected area.
That feature was on the locallab branch, but it was decided that the tool did not integrate well into the code and was too limited in functionality and so would not get merged.
That’s too bad. I found it useful. I was able to light up a person’s face in one of my images. Also, you could blur or darken areas. It made RT better. I hope it is brought back.
Hello, just send your photo to GIMP to do that. RT has even a button for that.
Hello @paulmatth,
Yes, I’m aware of that, GIMP and others. I just thought it was neat to be able to do that in RT, and I miss the tools. By the way, I basically only use RT with my raw images, that’s why I like it. Thanks for the tip anyway.
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You can somehow do this with the Vignetting Correction tool. But there is no way to blur and desaturate like it was possible with the old tools.
I think this might answer the question I was thinking of asking - was locallab an implementation of what Adobe calls Adjustment brushes?
@djotaku,
I don’t use Adobe but RawTherapee with Local Lab is very cool. If you want to try it @sguyader has files you can download.
Similar, though it’s not a brush but an area formed of four ellipsoids.
Some kind of selective tool would be appreciated in raw editing mode.
Landscape shots are the first one to come my mind that would benefit from this.
Different brightness for sky and ground selectively.
For landscapes, you can do something similar with the Graduated Filter (under the Exposure tab).
For landscapes, you can do something similar with the Graduated Filter
That’s true, until you have something large and pointy sticking out of the horizon line.
Then you have two options, make the pointy thing recieve some amount of the fraduate filter or position the graduate filter way that it doesn’t overlap the thingy. 
It would be superb if graduate filter would have freehand or similar feature to exclude areas.
I agree. Darktable has this functionality but I prefer to work in RT. Having to export to GIMP involves several more steps (the initial export and then gimp workflow plus creating iterative saves) while retaining the benefits of non-destructive RAW editing. Using a grad filter for this just doesn’t give the control necessary - I don’t want to darken and area, but do selective area editing with all of RTs tools.
Finally, a shout out to the developers of all these programs. You’re awesome! Thanks for making RAW editing a FOSS reality.
That’s right, but we use Rawtherapee to work on raw data and to benefit from the high dynamic range . Coming back to “tif” file (8bit) is a regression. Furthermore the tools of Rawtherapee are really powerful that’s too bad to discard this possibility.I hope this idea will receive the attention it deserve.
SM
The NIK software collection and previous versions of the software shipped with Nikon cameras (which was written by the people who wrote the NIK software) have a similar feature, they call it a control point.
The NIK sw is free btw but it requires Adobe PS 
I was wondering what was the problem with RT’s implementation and is there a version that I can download to test it out.
Many thanks to all the RT developers.
not really any more. If you use Gimp 2.9.4 or further there are some PY scripts made by Partha and some other integrations made by me. you can find those PY scripts already integrated with the GIMP versions you can downlod at Partha’s place or the PY scripts alone at my GitHub.
HI,
I run all my softwares from Faststone still all nik.