I am glad to see some of the normal things that average people like. 
We can get very technical on this forum. 
Nerds. 
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Oh, don’t get me started on Adobe products. Every time I used one, all of my disk and resources would be used to the limit that even my OS Windows wouldn’t have enough memory or swap. Although I have a low end machine, I hear it happens to even the high end. You really need to build a rig specially for them. That was the last straw for me. It was a long time ago, before the subscription nonsense.
Despite the brief gtk3 kerfuffle, RT has never been resource heavy. It might be slow on my machine compared to others but never unstable or unfriendly.
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i need to correct my comment from above:
Auto-Matched may be helpful at the beginning, but later it’s more of a hindrance to get good tonal values. Now I always start with Neutral, and it’s surprisingly easy to get good results with RT.
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I totally agree, I do the same thing.
The funny thing is that without Auto-Matched I would hardly have entered RT.
Now, and especially with the super help in this forum, I realize that it’s relatively easy to master the brightness with the curves. And I’ve found that when I start with Auto-Matched, it’s very hard to go on with the corners, the lights are often pale and almost broken, when I then manually correct further.
So, it’s a big gain for me not to use the Auto-Matched Tone Corve anymore.
micha
It is still worthwhile to see what auto-matched yields for comparison. That and you can always override the modules it alters.
Yes, it was a huge gain to have the Auto-Matched, so my interest in raw development really started.
But now I want more and I see that it is much better for me to start Neutral. Sometimes I look at what Auto-Matched does, but then I go back to Neutral. So it is much easier for me to get much further.
micha
As a pixel peeper I enjoy the quick scroll zoom and all the different demosaicing methods. And of course pixelshift with all the masking possibilities, as far as I know there is nothing out there that can match it.
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What bit of information or screenshot would most speak to you if you didn’t know RawTherapee and landed on its website?
Whatever was most closely related to the whatever difficulties I was dealing with at that moment: aka It depends.
RawTherapee feels more like a warehouse of post-processing techniques rather than a single app. So RT probably does have something that helps — we just have to figure out which of the multiple applicable techniques to choose.
What about RawTherapee do you like most?
That’s changed several times. Currently:
- Lab L Curve
- Lab CH Curve
- Control Cage Tone Curve
- Control Point In/Out Values
Seems that I can more easily make pictures I like with those, than with the other stuff on the Exposure and Color tab.
You say you’re looking for content for the new website. I’d suggest a gallery of 3-10 Before/After images, along with raw files and pp3s that people can download and run on their computer to learn the software. This would be accompanied by a YouTube screencast video explaining to people how to open a raw file and apply different parts of the pp3 to it.
In fact @s7habo posted a great example earlier in this thread, here.
I’ve often been frustrated when taking sunrise/sunset pix, with the color washed out of the sky and water. I’d love to see that raw file and the pp3 that got that result.
The following won’t work for the website but I find it interesting.
I spent a year or so getting familiar with RawTherapee and Gimp, which go together like Siamese twins. I’m almost a year into Darktable now, which is vastly different but not necessarily better.
With RawTherapee my workflow was to edit the same raw image three or four times focusing on different areas of the image, and then to use desaturated tone area masking or threshold masking or even totally manually created masks to bring selected areas of an edited raw into multiple layers in Gimp (with transparent backgrounds). And then to combine as needed. Darktable doesn’t work that way.
What I like most about that workflow is the ability to manually edit the black and white Gimp masks before applying them to the image.
Darktable is cool too but my workflow there tends to be 95% Darktable with not much Gimp. The two directions are quite different. Sometimes one is better while others the other.
What I love about RawTherapee is the assortment of tools that one can bring to an image with a problem. Unfortunately, that is exactly what I think turns new, relatively unskilled users off; they try to edit an image and start worrying about how many of the tools they should be using on it. Somewhere on the website (or in RawPedia with a pointer from the website) there could be a very simple tutorial with some comments on what the most basic or critical processing steps would be along with some indication of which tools would probably not be required on a perfectly exposed and composed snapshot. I’m not web knowledgeable but would be happy to help with the raw text.
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One of the best aspects is the high degree of precision that most adjustments allow, and the ease of doing them. For example, underexposed? After a big change to Exposure, tap the plus and minus marks for .05 increase until the histogram is where you want it.
Hallo afre,
Latest state: Yes, Auto-Matched is a big profit in RT. Sometimes, when I can’ t really manage with the curves, I look at what Auto-Matched is doing and I am impressed. My criticism came from the fact that there were a few pictures, which I had begun with Auto-Matched and then it didn’t really go well: all efforts were in vain: the faces became so dull and pale. My manual work with the curves, without Auto-Matched was much better.
But, the fact that RT has the possibility of the A is a gain.
micha