I just don't seem to be getting Rawtherapee software

[jcuknz]

I did get a few shots from different angles and they did work better. Things are better over here. And this shot definitely proves there is only so much pp can do.

Yes I agree that this shot is a 'no-good' and glad things are getting better. Focus when it is as bad as this cannot be solved, by me anyway

[xpatUSA]

This thread caught my eye because the title suggested a discussion about RawTherapee. But the posts are about everything but. Made even more difficult when the OP says absolutely nothing about RawTherapee. Ho hum.

[jamn4ex]

I think your auto focus was fooled by the sharp contrast of the edge of the board and the shadow, thus the focus looks just past the head and above. The subject doesn't have a lot of contrast. That would account for the excellent focus on the caterpillar but not here.

[JBW]

I appreciate all of the effort from all of you. I would hate to have you think i did not value the critiques. This was taken on the same screen but with different conditions; rain instead of sunshine and flash instead of natural light. be that as it may I have tried to incorporate the critiques. The shot is from the side rather than top , the light is softish, i have cropped tightly and not over pp-ed.

[ajohnw]

You have suddenly jumped to 1/2000 sec exposure Brian at F8 100ISO. Much better exposure too.

If you look at the histogram top right with this shot loaded you will see that the graphs go well across the width of it. Usually an indication of a decent exposure.

As posted the autolevels button improves it followed by unsharp mask at it's standard setting and then micro contrast. On the other hand to keep lighting as is just use unsharp mask and micro contrast. Unsharp mask is generally needed when ever a shot is reduced in size. Micro contrast has a slider to set the amount applied. As the exposure is a decent one autolevels doesn't change much and only makes minor changes to the sliders under the button. It saves a lot of fiddling and things like brightness, exposure and contrast it alters can be tweaked manually afterwards.

I'm fed up of commenting on Rawtherapee. It's actually one of the easier packages to use and the controls I have mentioned are in all packages. Speed depends on the machine it's run on and also the size of the image that is being worked on. It's pretty average speed wise in my view.

On you camera I notice that you can select a single central AF point. Probably best to use it on subjects like this. On something large like a moth you may need to position it so that it 1/2 covers the moth and the rest being on the background. Look for contrast in other words. Then 1/2 press the shutter, reframe and take the shot. Where you can try to find some contrast 1/3 of the way into the subject. That may not work out if the depth of field is insufficient but following a few shots were you can do this you should get a feel for where to focus to get as much as possible sharp. Manual focus can be tricky on cameras with an electronic viewfinder. A 7x or more magnified view is needed.

My moth was taken with flash. No point in trying anything else without a big increase in ISO. Sometimes the way to use flash on a camera is to select manual, speed max flash sync speed or slower, F8 it seems in your case and then set the flash to auto.

This is the shot with the mods I mentioned



It's also possible to change the lighting with curves and in this case a bit of use of the saturation slider. Highlight recovery slider in this case as well. This has reduced the width of the histogram a bit but not by all that much. I'm inclined to agree with others that you should post some completely un modified images and not with so much reduction.



John
-

[JBW]

John it is an easy package for you to use. it is not easy for me. it just doesn't work the way my mind does.

[ajohnw]

John it is an easy package for you to use. it is not easy for me. it just doesn't work the way my mind does.

What I meant Brian is that it's comparatively an easy package to use. It doesn't offer much instant gratification other than auto levels and in many cases it's default settings. If your head wont fit to it there is likely to be problems what ever you use. The same basic controls I mentioned are in all packages. Just don't take on too many in one go. Lots can be done with just curves and the black level slider. The standard unsharp mask setting are likely to be fine. Maybe you should spend some time searching rawtherapee curve on youtube or any package name as all do the same thing. Some might refer to raw files - the effects are the same.

One thing I am not so keen on that has been added now is that it saves the pipe - that's the processing steps some one has done on a shot. It aimed at processing a lot of shots in the same way. This means that the same setting will be loaded every time you load the same photo. That can stopped in the preferences, got to by opening Rawtherapee directly. They refer to it as a processing profile.

Have to laugh. I just tried it's noise reduction. Impressive but I did have to google for some instructions as I have never used it before. I came up with a setting that probably isn't optimum. I will only ever achieve that with practice. Most PP is like that.

John
-

[JBW]

[QUOTE=ajohnw;358029]What I meant Brian is that it's comparatively an easy package to use. It doesn't offer much instant gratification other than auto levels and in many cases it's default settings. If your head wont fit to it there is likely to be problems what ever you use.

i am going to keep banging away at it. next Christmas may be the time for me to upgrade my camera to one with RAW capabilities and then a program like this will come in handy.

I am finding that this attempt has given me a great incentive to get the absolute best photo i can that will need the least pp.