Using Both Raw Therapee and Darktable

Does anyone find that using RT may be better for certain types of photos while DT may be better suited for others. E.G RT better for Landscape while DT better for portrait work.

yes. RT is better for everything with fur and feathers, e.g. animals, where sharpness and noise is very critical, or high iso or very noisy photos. dt is better for landscape and complex natural lighting situations, where multiple masks are needed. I do not really have much experience with portrait though

I really wish there was a way to get the best of both worlds.

Me too. That’s why I was asking if one is better than the other. May have to use both for different images

Thank you of your reply. Landscape vs Portrait was just an example, however most of my work is landscape and old buildings, farms, barns etc.

Tried RT and so far so good, but I think its time to try DT as well.

You may want to give a try at ART, it has some nice local editing tools (parametric masks).

I generally use DT for everything because it’s fast and the masks are easy to use for both landscapes and portraits, in my opinion. The profiled denoise just works, compared to RT where I still can’t get the hang of the luminance curve.

One thing that bothers me in DT is the lack of DCP support. You can convert the DCP into ICC and load it into DT, but I much prefer a simpler native solution. The effects of no DCP correction are shown in this post.

I keep switching between DT and RT because I don’t see a clear winner. DT is easier to use after you master its interface. I can quickly get “punchy” looking photos from DT. Usually this is what I want, but sometimes DT can plug the dark tones and blow the light ones. To resolve that I have to play with the base curve. Also I could never get good sharpening and noise reduction from DT. Profiled noise treatment gives me plasticky looking images. Shadows and Highlights is good, but the default Gaussian methods almost always gives halos, have to switch to bilateral.

On the other hand RT has a lot of powerful tools, some of them too complicated to understand (retinex, wavelets, etc). Sharpening and noise reduction are better than in DT. But to get good colors I have to use Adobe dcp profiles, without them the sky is purplish and skin color is off. And to get good tonal curve I have to use the Auto Match Curve as the starting point.

As a long time user of both, my two main observations.

darktable :- no deconvolution sharpening.

RawTherapee :- cannot see results of 1.1 applications at zoomed out view. (unless I’m missing something).

Otherwise a big :+1: to both.

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darktable:


RT:

If I edit a photo in RT first, I find that it is possible to get a very similar result with dt, though it takes a lot of time (with dt). But not the other way round.

This. Does dt have any kind of post resize sharpening? RT post resize sharpening is a highly useful tool, especially when processing tons of images for preview and share.

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Nope, no post resize sharpening.