I am new to RAWTherapee and want to use it to convert camera RAW files for any correction needed in Picture Window Pro v8.
I was using Neutral and someone told me that Unclipped would be a better profile for my work. I am also exporting using ProPhoto.
Bearing in mind I don’t want any manipulation to the file within RT does anyone think there are other settings that will be better for me.
Tony - London UK
If you don’t want any manipulations by RT and your camera is not supported by Picture Window, then you should convert to DNG, e.g. with dnglab: Releases · dnglab/dnglab · GitHub, this will be faster.
The usage of PW will tell you, if RT could produce a better source with special settings.
But as the manual of PW says
“The most important adjustments to make in the raw converter are: Highlight and shadow recovery, Noise reduction, Lens distortion, chromatic aberration and light falloff corrections”.
So, the best workflow, as I see, is to do the corrections in RT and then export the image to tif for usage in PW.
Thanks Kurt,
I am not sure why Jonathan recommends making those adjustments in the RAW converter when PW can do them all except lens distortion.
Your comment about dnglab I will pursue.
I am curious too. I dabble with it from time to time…some of the filters and adjustments are really neat and the “nodal” pipeline offers some cool possibilitites… I think it supports Libraw at least but I would also wonder why you cannot just use your files directly… Maybe as Kurt mentions its nuance around HLR and noise…
Whatever code Jonathan has adopted to get from RAW to TIFF/JPG is not good. He recommends that you ought to try something else and RAWTherapee happens to be at the top of his list.
What I don’t understand, (and anyway Kurt and I may misinterpret what he wrote) is why spend time fiddling with shadows and highlights if all the info is coming across into PWP
It has
Updated to LibRaw 0.21.3.
and Lensfun so I bet it might be the highlight recovery/reconstruction and maybe the demosaicing and noise might be better dealt with in RT…
Perhaps because Jonathan knows the limitations of PW?
Unlikely in my view. Just the convert from RAW bit
RawPedia says:
" The “Unclipped” processing profile (introduced in RawTherapee 5.6) allows one to save an image in a way which preserves data across the whole tonal range, including clipped shadows and highlights, thus allowing for strong exposure adjustments and dynamic range compression of the saved file while retaining detail in the shadows and highlights."
More here: Unclipped - RawPedia
Sounds too good to be true, but it’s your call. There’s next to no difference in the histogram just flipping back and forth betwixt the two profiles without editing.
Unclipped might mean that values during editing are not bounded until the image is saved. For example saving as 8-bit sRGB i.e. anything outside 0-255 gets clipped during the export conversion from the 32-bit floating-point working space.
See more about bounding here:
So the view is that Neutral and Uclipped are similar.
What Output profile do you recommend when exporting from RAWTherapee?
I am using ProPhoto but have a feeling I should turn to one variant of sRGB
Similar but not the same.
That depends on the destination of your export.
If you are only exporting to an sRGB destination, that would make sense; if you are exporting to another app for further processing, it would not.
Test it. Convert to DNG (still raw), to unclipped and neutral, import it into PW and develop. Look for differences. In the end, you must like the result. Take the way which suites you best.
Unclipped or Neutral
Prophoto or RTv4_sRGB
Tried all permutations and cannot find any difference.
Decided to go for Unclipped and ProPhoto