Raw Therapee

[GEORDIE]

I have pse11 which has basic acr. My question is would the raw therapee program be of any advantage.
Colin.

[Manfred M]

In general I would say no.

ACR is probably the most commonly used RAW converter out there. Are you have issues with it?

[GEORDIE]

Hi Manfred
As PSE 11 has the basic acr which works well for me I just was curious as to whether Raw Therapee had anything extra.
Haven't seen it only just heard about it.
Colin

[Manfred M]

It's popular free, open source tool, but it is not directly integrated into your editor, so you do have to output a TIFF file and then import it into your editor. I don't think it has a couple of features that I always use; lens correction and chromatic abberation removal.

[Donald]

With Elements it is indeed a basic model of ACR that's included, so you are not getting some of the features of the ACR that's packaged with the full-blown Photoshop. So, yes, there will be the opportunity for more work to be done at the RAW stage with Raw Therapee than with the ACR you have. The question for you is whether you want/need that.

Some of us to subscribe to the notion that you should do as much as you can at the RAW stage. If that seems like a good idea to you, then, yes, RT will have something to offer.

But as Manfred says, it's not as seamlessly integrated with the packages that come next; e.g. Elements. You can't just hit the button and, by magic going on under the hood, have it appear ready for further, final work in Elements. It's about have to save it as a TIFF, open up Elements, open the TIFF and then carry on from there. No big deal unless you can't be bothered with all that 'faffing' about, or you're in a hurry.

I used RT before I bought DxO Optics because I felt it offered me more and I found it excellent to use. But RT is a good tool.

[Colin Southern]

Off memory, the PSE version of ACR limits you to the first two ACR tabs. Personally, it's not often that I use the others -- and what's on those other tabs can be done in PS or PSE anyway. Doing what you can in a RAW converter is always best practice, but unless you're making big changes then you probably won't notice any difference.

[ajohnw]

Rawtherapee will do just about everything you might want to do to a raw file, jpg, png or tiff except local editing with what people usually call brushes, dodging, burning, cloning, healing and also selection work. That's left to the GIMP and there is a button available to export to other editors directly. The GIMP is a full blown layers package and many people reckon it's just as capable as PS - if some one knows how to use it. Generally doing some things in the GIMP involves using more layers than PS. The GIMP also has a lot of graphic artist facilities that may look pointless to photographers. There are a lot of GIMP tutorials about on the web. There help pages are also a lot better than they used to be.

Rawtherapee also has a few plus points. The manual is fairly understandable and doesn't have too many pages. It has it's own forum. Interestingly for Nikon users it explains just how to get hold of and use Nikon's ICC files from NEX.

It's downsides are few apart from instant gratification buttons. There is an auto levels and the default settings are usually sensible but that's about it.

The GIMP did have a problem of sorts. It's was reckoned to use 8bit colour however the last few versions are 32bit floating point colour. There is a lot of miss understanding about the effects of 8bit colour but in essence post processing can cause banding but in my experience it has to be pretty extreme to do that. Last time I saw stated figures Rawtherapee uses 16bit and Adobe products 15. Both may use 32bit FP now.

I only run open source software. From raw I either use Ufraw, Rawtherapee or Fotoxx but the latter is only available for Linux. Ufraw also has a button that will export directly to the GIMP. It should export to other packages as well. Ufraw is more of a pure raw conversion package. Rawtherapee tosses in a number of other things as well even LAB adjustments now. In essence raw conversion is about getting camera colour spaces into some lower bit count default in a manner suitable for further processing. There is a fair old learning curve involved in that which ever package is used but defaults can be used. Curve is the appropriate word to use here as curves are used to control the process. All packages use them so a tutorial for one is good for another. There are some decent tutorials on PP on CinC off the home page.

If you happen to be a Linux user I would suggest trying Fotoxx. This includes local retouching. I feel the latest version has gone a little astray at the moment so I would suggest version 13.12 because slight brightness adjustments toss users straight into the deep end at the moment on 14.01.1. It's site has a very good set of video tutorials. It can be installed directly from most distributions. Once that has been done compiling the latest version from source is trivial. Instruction are on it's web pages. The person who maintains it is considering my complaints about the latest and some previous versions at the moment.

One last aspect relating to open source. Finding the correct camera colour profiles can be a bit of a problem at times. The easiest answer is to install another one. Photivo find them and extract the ones needed. Photivo itself is a bit of a juggernaut and contains a vast bewildering array of PP filters. It too relies on the GIMP for local retouching.

Glad to hear some one has actually used Rawtherapee Donald. The complaint that some times gets me is a long complicated work flow. Well using PP to it's full extent picture by picture always is. It will do batch work as well and even save settings with an image. As always on open source additions keep getting added and currently it is not a pure raw converter, far from it.

John
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[xpatUSA]

I have pse11 which has basic acr. My question is would the raw therapee program be of any advantage.
Colin.

G'day, Colin. Didn't know they had geordies in S. Oz

I have PSE 6 and ACR 5.4 (5.4 is as high as you can go with PSE 6). I also have RawTherapee 4.0.

The advantages for me over ACR 5.4 are many.

I would highlight:

Three color picker value sets, always shown: RGB, HSV, Lab
Excellent histogram w/simultaneous R,G,B and Luminosity, all switchable on/off
Excellent color management - including real perceptual rendering intent - and a superior sRGB profile, among many others.
Your choice of working space (as compared to ACR 5.4).
Awesome sharpening, regular, USM, deconvolution and more.
Excellent noise reduction, billions of methods.
Editable (in Notepad) sidecar files, for what it's worth, or you can just read them as opposed to re-opening the file. You can also save them as profiles for opening future files of a particular flavor.
3 or 4 types of curve for everything.

I'll leave the negatives for others to point out because I don't print, rarely use layers and rarely use masking or all that other stuff so necessary to a true Pro.

Let us know what you decide!

Off memory, the PSE version of ACR limits you to the first two ACR tabs.

ACR 5.4 has three tabs in PSE6: Basic, Detail, Camera Calibration.

[GEORDIE]

Thank you for your input. As a learner I can see pp is a complex subject.
I will going through a vast learning curve (no pun intended).

Cheers Colin.

[GEORDIE]

Donald, I love CiC you good people give me great motivation to improve all aspects of my chosen retirement obsession.
Everyone on this forum so helpful.
Colin.

[GEORDIE]

Ted, wherever you go your sure to find a geordie.
A detailed reply which is very helpful.
Colin.

[dan marchant]

I really think that Adobe should clearly label PSE as having ACR- (Adobe Camera RAW minus), as it isn't obvious that it is a very limited version of the ACR than the one that ships with (full) Photoshop and Lightroom. The other key issue is that RAW development and pixel image editing are two different methods of editing. Some people do the bulk of their editing in RAW, others do the bulk of their in a pixel image editor like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Some of course edit RAW in ACR and then do additional pixel editing in Photoshop or PSE (or another pixel editor).

So to the OPs question. If you want to edit RAW then other packages beyond PSE would be a definite plus, simply because PSEs RAW processing abilities are so limited. You would be better off doing your RAW processing in another dedicated RAW processing package such as Lightroom, Raw therapee, or the RAW editing software that came with your camera - then using PSE to do pixel editing (on TIFF files exported from your RAW processor of choice).

[Colin Southern]

If you want to edit RAW then other packages beyond PSE would be a definite plus, simply because PSEs RAW processing abilities are so limited.

Only if the photographer needed any of the additional adjustments.

Case-in-point; me. Pretty much anything that I can do in ACR I DO do in ACR, and yet it's not often I go past the first tab. Does the average PSE user need options for split-toning? presets? snapshots? If the answer is yes then it's not the right tool for them, otherwise it's probably fine.

[lukaswerth]

I have used Raw Therapee and ACR with photoshop 6, and I generally use the latter in these days. But I do think Raw Therapee is also an excellent, free(!) and very extensive program which for me was very valuable when I was learning how to develop raw files. A disadvantage I find in Raw Therapee is that its sharpening tools tend to produce some ugly hatch pattern in shadow areas when I expose for highlights and recover shadow detail in the raw file (which works very well with my camera).
But I'd say download the latest version and see whether it is of use to you.

Lukas

[ajohnw]

They have just added a graduated filter to it - version 4.0.12. That I feel is needed and has been lacking for some time. It's likely to be needed on some shots before exporting to the GIMP for any local work. Clone,heal, dodge and burn are in the GIMP's standard toolbox. Easy to use but the dodge and burn default setting are rather strong. Rather a lot of plugins are available for the GIMP. Perhaps the best way of finding them is to search gimp useful plugins. If some one wants to get into layer work with the GIMP there are plenty of tutorials about.

John
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[Colin Southern]

They have just added a graduated filter to it - version 4.0.12.

I'm just having a play with it now - how do you apply multiple GND filters to the same image?

[ajohnw]

Only if the photographer needed any of the additional adjustments.

Case-in-point; me. Pretty much anything that I can do in ACR I DO do in ACR, and yet it's not often I go past the first tab. Does the average PSE user need options for split-toning? presets? snapshots? If the answer is yes then it's not the right tool for them, otherwise it's probably fine.

That's a good point on Rawtherapee too. In many cases all that is needed is the 1st tab apart from sharpening. The GIMP really comes in if say the shot has some power lines, lamp posts or what ever that need removing or some small areas that need brightening or darkening.

The 1st tab also has curves. I would hope some tutorial some where explains what that does along with contrast effects for some package or the other. It shouldn't matter which. Initially it's probably best to leave it as the default straight line.

The sharpening is rather good. The tone range it works over can be restricted preventing sharpening halo outlines. Unfortunately it uses numbers that differ from other packages. Just assume the defaults equate to other package's defaults and change accordingly. Here and elsewhere mouse hovers bring up info on none obvious features.

Autolevels seems to have improved a lot. Worth trying noting the sliders it adjusts - those can be changed manually afterwards or the neutral button clicked to go back to how it was.

There are 2 basic ways of saving files that might cause some confusion. One saves the file after modification. The other saves it plus the modifications that have been carried out. Best read the manual. In practice it always saves the file modified but automatically adds a suffix so that the original file is never over written. Saving the processing steps related to the original image is optional but if selected and the original image is reloaded these will be loaded as well. If not wanted where it states "Processing Profiles - last saved" click and select neutral.

There is also some instant gratification via bundled profiles and people can also create and load their own of course.

John
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[ajohnw]

I'm just having a play with it now - how do you apply multiple GND filters to the same image?

Ain't got a clue Colin. Best ask on their forum where if it wont do that some one might think that would be neat and add it. I don't think that would be a problem with the GIMP. Not sure why some one would want to do this. It looks to like they would have to add the ability to duplicate the set up as required. Shouldn't be difficult to do as it will be done via layers I suspect underneath it all. How many can LR do? I don't think there is any limit on the GIMP if layers are used. Not sure about the mouse drag way.

John
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[Colin Southern]

Ain't got a clue Colin. Best ask on their forum where if it wont do that some one might think that would be neat and add it. I don't think that would be a problem with the GIMP. Not sure why some one would want to do this. It looks to like they would have to add the ability to duplicate the set up as required. Shouldn't be difficult to do as it will be done via layers I suspect underneath it all. How many can LR do? I don't think there is any limit on the GIMP if layers are used. Not sure about the mouse drag way.

John
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Thanks John,

I don't think it can do it, but not to worry, I've uninstalled it now anyway -- the interface just drove me nuts (same reason I don't like Lightroom).

For what it's worth, I use multiple GNDs on just about every image - they're wonderful things for fine-tuning. In ACR one just presses "G" - sets the parameters (exposure, clarity, saturation etc) - and then drags the mouse from the start to the stop point. Rinse and repeat from different angles if one wishes (which is great for building vignettes where one side is already dark).