Rawtherapee interface complexity

Most of my time i 'm using the RawTherapee conversion tool to convert from RAW photos produced from my Nikon D3200 to jpg. RawTherapee is a cross-platform and it is released under the GNU General Public License Version 3 from January 2010. During the years the application attracted many programmers and photographers. It is really a powerful tool, how something it started to bothering me after checked the latest version. First lets see what Lightroom offers to the photographer:

Lightroom toolbar, screenshot taken from Lightroom Fanatic.

There are some interesting names that needs more explaining, such as how the shadows and highlights bars work or what is clarity, but nothing extreme complicated. Now lets see what RawTherapee offers:

Toolbar of RawTherapee for the Exposure settings.
This is the first thing that the user edits.

It offers an "Auto Levels" that automatic expands the histogram based on the % of clipped pixels. And then there are bars, a lot of bars. Exposure exists also in Lightroom, but then there is the Highlights and the Highlights compression threshold, that does not exist in Light room. The same for the Shadows, but there is not threshold here. Then there is the Lightness, but again no threshold here. Saturation is ok, although i would expect in different tab. Then you also have two (!) tone curves to play. The option that does not exists in rawtherapee is the clarity. It is called local contrast and it is in different tab. Lets see:

Options of contrast by detail levels in rawtherapee.

More options and it seems ok, not so complicated. However, there is a new tab called wavelet levels that it is essentially the same, but with much more options:

Wavelet levels RawTherapee.

Yes there is a lot of documentation, but the available settings are better suited for the research scientist rather to the simple photographer or user.

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont...

Static linking with gcc and g++

In this tutorial, we will explain what the static linking is, how this affect the size of final binary, and why statically linking with g++ sometimes is pain. By definition, a statically compiled binary is a group of programmer ‘s routines, external functions, and variables which are packed into the final binary executable. The compiler or the linker produces the final object and embeds all the functions and variables and the linking phase. There are two reasons of using dynamic linking and shared libraries: 1) Avoid creating a huge binary, if all the programs use a standard set of libraries why not having the operating system providing to them 2) Compatibility on operating system and machine dependant characteristics: sometimes the libraries must be implemented based on the architecture or the operating system and using dynamic linking is an easy way to avoid this catch. On the other hand, static linking is the ideal way of distributing one software product, pay...

Processing a High Dynamic Range raw image with RawTherapee

Editing High contrast images is hard because you have at the same time to decrease the highlights, increase the dark areas, and at the same time keep the natual colours. Although not always possible, shooting RAW always helps. The RawTherapee offers a plethora of tools to "fix" your images. To illustrate the tools available in RawTherapee, we will edit a picture taken by Ivan Sagalaev and released under CC license in the Play Raw competition of the pixls.us forum here . Image after importing to RawTherapee. Step 1: Preparation. First we fix the distortion (if exists) in the Transform tab. Before start editing we always try to fix possible distortions of the image. Initial Histogram of the picture. Step 2: Editing the light. The second step is to press the "Auto Levels" button in the Exposure tab. This will light the dark places of the picture, but it is not enough.The sky now is it much lighter than before and the colors washed out. Exposu...

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