Selective tool in RawTherapee

Good evening

I’m quite new to rawtherapee, but I found its interface extremely easy to use. Nevertheless I just can’t understand whether there’s a tool for selective actions, like adobe’s brush or snapseed’s one. How can I use it? Its existence would make rawtherapee definitely independent and auto-sufficient.

Thank you for help and assistance

Hello @Tomm

Nevertheless I just can’t understand whether there’s a tool for selective actions, like adobe’s brush.

Unfortunately, there is not anything like that right now.

Since you are alredy familiar with RawTherapee, maybe, you can be interested in trying ART, which is an open source “fork” of RawTherapee, created by Alberto Griggio.
With ART [1] you basically get this feature you are looking for (there is even a “clone tool” implemented, which is not available in RawTherapee, in case you are interested…)

BTW, with RawTherapee, in some future versions, you are going to take advantage of this feature as well [2].
At present, it is still in the works which is the reason you didn’t find it :slight_smile:

[1] ART feature requests and discussion]
[2] Local Lab build

1 Like

I must add that there are masks in RT, although not self-evident at first sight. Of course they are not like a brush, but you can do pretty focused actions with them.

As examples you can find masks in Color Toning (inside Color correction regions) and Haze Removal

… I hope that RawTherapee does not become like those “minestrone” programs (read soup) that include a piece of cataloging, a piece of Raw development and a piece of photo editing by doing everything in a mediocre way.

Hello @carlos1960

I hope that RawTherapee does not become like those “minestrone” programs (read soup)

If you take a loot at GitHub, where RawTherapee development is shown [1], you will notice that its development has slowed down considerably these past months.
Therefore, I don’t think there is this risk: I mean having an overhaul of its GUIs in the future…

With every Open Source software it is extremely difficult to get some experienced developers, on board, to get the job done :slight_smile:

[1] GitHub - Beep6581/RawTherapee: A powerful cross-platform raw photo processing program

Does it mean that RT raw development is already mediocre?

… no, I think RawTherapee is the best Raw development software precisely because it has not implemented features that are specific to photo editing or cataloging software.

1 Like