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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...

Earlier this year i did some videos ( here and here ) regarding how to remove the noise from high ISO raw images. I decided to write down the work flow with text and pictures to avoid the seeking the video in different parts. The original file is available here: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/playraw-high-iso-challenge/2778 and the image is taken by PkmXDec using a Sony A6000 + Canon FD 85mm f/1.8 S.S.C. + Lens Turbo II wide open. Out of the box, the picture shows a lot of noise and the color is too warm if we press the "Auto Levels". This happens because he ISO is 12800 and the lighting available: sodium light. In addition, the color noise has a specific noise pattern, as shown in the uniform part of the picture on the left. Initial RAW image conversion using the default options. 1. Our first approach is to change the Demosaicing method from the "RAW" tab. The "RAW" tab contains all the options responsible from converting the image from the RAW fo...

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...