Sharpening workflows, especially with Raw Therapee

[Kadsura]

I am interested to hear about sharpening workflows people here are using, both on raw and bitmap files. Do you do everything in the raw processing stage, or do you perform additional creative sharpening and/or output sharpening in a pixel editor like GIMP? If you use RT, do you find that it is adequate for most images? Do you use other software like Topaz? Are there FOSS alternatives to Topaz worth looking at?

For raw images in RT, I typically use a pre-set profile that includes capture sharpening (along with defringe, chrominance noise reduction, etc.) I always check Post-resize sharpening for re-sized images.

I used to be fairly proficient at creative sharpening in LR–years ago, when I still used Adobe products. However, I need to learn more about creative sharpening with RT.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[sillyxone]

I’m not familiar with RT, but from darktable and GIMP, I haven’t found anything as good as Richardson-Lucy deconvolution (rl-deblur), it’s also available in GIMP as a plugin I think.

RL-reblur is not sharpening, it’s a reconstruction process to bring the most details out of the lens. However, it tends to accentuate noise, so your image will need to be clean. Luckily, the availability of AI/neural-net denoise is the perfect companion to RL-deblur.

My workflow now is editing in darktable but leaving out denoise and sharpening till the export process (which is a Python script that applies nind-denoise then RL-deblur). See samples in the thread:

[feedback needed] integrating nind-denoise with darktable

On FOSS side, I think nind-denoise (created by Benoit Brummer) is the only practical AI denoise available that I tested. I’ve been using it personally and professionally, totally happy with its performance, ISO up to 10,000 can look clean as ISO200 (even with artifacts, reduction of false colors from noise is a huge plus). Search for dt-nind-denoise to see samples. It works on RAW images that have not been denoised, and it’s slow (about 9 seconds on RTX3060, or 63 seconds on Ryzen 5 7640HS, for…

[marter (Martin Werner)]

@Kadsura

For raw images in RT, I typically use a pre-set profile that includes capture sharpening (along with defringe, chrominance noise reduction, etc.) I always check Post-resize sharpening for re-sized images.

similar here, i even reduce the amount of the automatic settings and for me thats enough in most cases. Very rarely i add some sharpening via local editing.

[Wayne_Sutton]

There’s a good article by @Marc_Roovers in this blog post about the new denoise features in RawTherapee 5.13. and how they can be integrated into a workflow Has RawTherapee 5.13 Changed the Way We Should Denoise RAW Files? – Open Source Photography

[SCHA (Stuart)]

Hey @Kadsura I use 5.13 rc1-30 currently, but have been using 5.12 until recently. I have a pre-set .pp3 that you can use/take a look… (Basic Start v3 .pp3 (19.1 KB)) that incorporates (to the best of my knowledge) the Game Changer workflow, which does have a preprocessing RAW and Capture Sharpening in the workflow… see the .pp3 for my set up.

Also discussed…
Here: Game Changer – How to Process a Sunset - #12 by jdc
Here: Game changer & others informations - #3 by jdc
and references/sections in here: https://rawpedia.pixls.us/

Hope that helps.

[sallyanne (Susan)]

I use RT, gimp/GMIC ‘Contrast Enhancement’, does just that/ sharpens a lot without anything else, and Nik Collection (still have the free version). Mostly use define in Nik to get rid of noise