RawTherapee 5.7 Released (Free Software raw processor)

[patdavid]

The RawTherapee team has just released a new version: RawTherapee 5.7!

• Film negative tool
• Support for reading the “rating” tags from Exif and XMP
• The usual bug fixes, speed optimizations, and raw format support improvements.

For more information see:

https://rawtherapee.com/downloads/5.7/



--
https://pixls.us - Free/Open Source Photography

 

[Bobthearch]

Thanks for the update. It's a quality program even though I find it a bit too science-y.

 

[Fotoni]

It is an overwhelming editor, if you think to use every setting it has. I use mostly just exposure settings, shadow/highlights and sometimes l*a*b adjustments. Color tab has much richer white balance settings than Lightroom, if you wish to tweak.

Hopefully they will continue to optimize single editor tab mode. It is rather slow compared to Lightroom. Also allow to put some buttons to the vertical tab when using single editor tab mode, so I can remove those two toolbars compeltely to make more room for the photo. Include true fullscreen mode where only the photo is visible and use whole screen. Lightroom has that feature. Next I would like to have true RAW histogram and overexposured pixels, so I can easily check every photo without Rawdigger. Hotkey for that would be great, so I can toggle between RAW and processed.

 

[JuanVillarreal]

I started using RawTherapee to learn, but from the fully neutral profile that I tried, I could not get beautiful photos. There was a default profile that sort of gave me a nice place to start, but with my not-so good abilities I was getting better results using the camera-specific raw editors.

A few months ago, after updating to 5.5, I noticed the "Auto-Matched Tone Curve" feature. This will reverse-engineer the curve that the camera is using from the JPEG preview embedded in the raw file. This gives me a photo that looks correct so that I can start modifying it. With my abilities, I can get results I like this way, so there is much less need for the camera's own program.

I have an Olympus OM-D EM10, and I like it very much, but hate the included Viewer 3 software. It requires me to import the photos, which makes no sense unless you have all your photos in the computer's disk and It allows only small adjustments to be made, with very little flexibility. You could of course buy LightRoom, but the disproportion in price between camera and software would be far too big.

I will try out the negative module. Previously I had taken photos of negatives with my Nikon DSLR, but inverting in Nikon's Capture NX-D gave me poor results. I had much better results in RawTherapee, probably because there were no gamma curves to contend with, but so far I'm not happy. We'll see...

 

[Simon97]

Dang! I just figured out my custom profile for v5.5. It's really a great program once you figure it out. The ability to reduce noise and retain detail in v5.5 made it a winner for me as I use micro 4/3rds. These new features look interesting.

P.S. the automatic chromatic aberration elimination is marvelous. Just be sure to turn off the one in the lens profile before using it.

 

[fferreres]

It is an overwhelming editor, if you think to use every setting it has. I use mostly just exposure settings, shadow/highlights and sometimes l*a*b adjustments. Color tab has much richer white balance settings than Lightroom, if you wish to tweak.

Hopefully they will continue to optimize single editor tab mode. It is rather slow compared to Lightroom. Also allow to put some buttons to the vertical tab when using single editor tab mode, so I can remove those two toolbars compeltely to make more room for the photo. Include true fullscreen mode where only the photo is visible and use whole screen. Lightroom has that feature. Next I would like to have true RAW histogram and overexposured pixels, so I can easily check every photo without Rawdigger. Hotkey for that would be great, so I can toggle between RAW and processed.

I think it has all you said. Just press M to hide all bars, and f to make the photo fill the screen. It of course has easy highlighting of under/overexposed. Also, the RAW and the “processed” file are the same. All changes can be undone, and with locking everything can be compared with the altered version. Can also show side by side.

 

[fferreres]

P.S. the automatic chromatic aberration elimination is marvelous. Just be sure to turn off the one in the lens profile before using it.

I use manual lenses so it’s good that the image is always unaltered. However I’d like to have an easier way for lens corrections. There is some functionality but did not try (most surely my lenses may not be there).

 

[bjn70]

Unfortunately won't run on any of my computers. Maybe they should release a 32 bit version.

 

[ihateredbeanpaste2]

I may consider trying this out.

 

[Charles2]

If you have not tried the Auto-Adjust feature, see this post on the Raw Therapee forum that uses it to approximate the camera JPG - a convenient starting point for your processing:
https://discuss.pixls.us/t/from-neutral-to-output-in-a-few-steps/13693
If you are a beginner with RT, use this feature, maybe adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation to your taste, look at the sharpening tool, and you are done.

If you have a recently introduced camera, see whether Raw Therapee now supports its raw format.

 

[fferreres]

If you have not tried the Auto-Adjust feature, see this post on the Raw Therapee forum that uses it to approximate the camera JPG - a convenient starting point for your processing:
https://discuss.pixls.us/t/from-neutral-to-output-in-a-few-steps/13693
If you are a beginner with RT, use this feature, maybe adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation to your taste, look at the sharpening tool, and you are done.

If you have a recently introduced camera, see whether Raw Therapee now supports its raw format.

Do you know if they solved that on some computer 5.6 was very crazy? I tried it and besides text appearing ultra small and in parts large, etc. it tended to crash a lot. It’d also crash when 2 usb cards at the same time in two USB ports (Mac) and also when I inserted a 256gm card in the reader.

 

[Don_Campbell]

I've been using RawTherapee (RT) for 11+ years (since version 2.3 I think). As Fotoni says, and I've written on DPreview forums many times, there is no need to use all the different controls/tweak-tools. You can start by using the simple exposure, brightness, saturation, contrast, sharpening tools and then expand your knowledge and get into the many other useful controls that add to the power of the program. The manual, "RawPedia," is quite useful. If you use RT you should also check out RawPedia. More later on that.

As I've often mentioned in these forums, RT is slowed a bit by using 32bit floating point arithmetic for all the operations. That prevents the rounding errors of applying long sequences of integer operations which may create banding errors in the resulting images. The extra overhead is not oppressive on my Linux box with an older i7 processor and an equally old fanless video card. Some of the batching tools mean that the end result is being cranked out from the processing queue while I continue to scan my images for new favorites to pp.

The point of the many different controls/tweak-tools is not to overwhelm you with the power of RT, but instead to give you backward compatibility along with all that flexibility. When you use RT for developing and tweaking your first result is the creation of a "profile" with all the processing operations without changing your original image. You then apply that profile to produce the post-processed image. Keeping old tools/controls when adding new functions means that the old profiles continue weeks or years later to give you the same tweaked image from your original. You can later start from your first profile to tweak again with the new tools or with your better understanding of the original tools.

The profile your create to develop one image is often useful for applying to other raw images created under the same conditions. You can copy that profile to those images one at a time or to multiple selected images from within the file browser. From that copied profile you may want to make some slight changes to improve individual images but you may have saved a lot of duplication in the process.

You can also copy only selected parts of a profile if you choose. I often find that I have 20 or 30 images exposed in approximately the same light which can use the same profile for most attributes but which I want to crop differently. I can individually set the crop boundaries and then if I go back and change the color profile a little I can copy everything from the new profile to all the images at once, excluding the crop. The boundaries stay the same but the colors get their update. It's handy for dealing with bursts during action that all occur with about the same lighting but which need different cropping.

One of the great features of RT tends to be overlooked by the modern sensibility that says that all things should be obvious without reading the manual. Nope. The manual is very helpful and there are things that you won't discover if you don't browse the manual every now and then and read an explanation of one or another of the "different" image tweaking tools. You don't need to read it from start to finish but selecting any tool you find baffling and looking up the section on that tool will be enlightening.

 

[patdavid]

Good question - I'm not sure I've seen this behavior?

Is it reproducible for you? If so would you mind filing a bug on the tracker? https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/issues/new

How to write useful bug reports - RawPedia

rawpedia.rawtherapee.com

 

[fferreres]

Good question - I'm not sure I've seen this behavior?

Is it reproducible for you? If so would you mind filing a bug on the tracker? https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/issues/new

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/How_to_write_useful_bug_reports

 

[Don_Campbell]

Unfortunately won't run on any of my computers. Maybe they should release a 32 bit version.

An explanation and possible solutions for 32-bit processors is here:

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/The_Floating_Point_Engine

The manual is good and pretty darned complete. Useful for those interested in understanding RT.

 

[Don_Campbell]

It is an overwhelming editor, if you think to use every setting it has. I use mostly just exposure settings, shadow/highlights and sometimes l*a*b adjustments. Color tab has much richer white balance settings than Lightroom, if you wish to tweak.

Hopefully they will continue to optimize single editor tab mode. It is rather slow compared to Lightroom.

I don't do Lightroom so I don't know the details of how much slower. Read the manual and you'll find out what optimizations are made for dealing with the overhead in using floating point for calculations.

Several of those optimizations make approximations to your settings when image magnifications are below 100% and only make the actual setting when magnifications are at 100%. The noise reduction setting is only apparent at 100% magnification. The idea is to make setting the sliders have reasonable feedback but only take the time to apply the setting fully when the magnification gives you the best view of its effect. Again, reading the manual to this application is required to get the fullest use out of its power and to prevent frustration if you are unclear how to use a tool.

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Editor#The_Preview_Panel

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Contrast_by_Detail_Levels

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Sharpening

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Noise_Reduction

And so on.

It's really a good manual and the manual really helps one to get the best results from using the program. Really. Read the manual if you want to use RT. Even if you tend to be someone who doesn't read manuals in general.

If you cannot bring yourself to use the manual you will probably be less frustrated using a "do more of it for you" style of application with simpler sets of tools. There are lots of those out there.

[snip...]

 

[fferreres]

Unfortunately won't run on any of my computers. Maybe they should release a 32 bit version.

An explanation and possible solutions for 32-bit processors is here:

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/The_Floating_Point_Engine

The manual is good and pretty darned complete. Useful for those interested in understanding RT.

I agree fully on this. While we have largely moved to a society of "intuitive-everything"* what has really happened is that functionality that isn't instantly intuitive is eliminated or automated, with whatever the designer feels must happen. But once you start reading the manual, you start understading how to use and combining things, and start to think like a builder. You can do almost anything in RT. It's like cooking. Today a lot of work is akin to choosing food from a menu, and choosing sides. But to cook, you need to learn a few principles, practice them, and then the limit is your imagination.

* (C) Myself, All Rights Reswerved

 

[Don_Campbell]

Unfortunately won't run on any of my computers. Maybe they should release a 32 bit version.

An explanation and possible solutions for 32-bit processors is here:

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/The_Floating_Point_Engine

The manual is good and pretty darned complete. Useful for those interested in understanding RT.

I agree fully on this. While we have largely moved to a society of "intuitive-everything"* what has really happened is that functionality that isn't instantly intuitive is eliminated or automated, with whatever the designer feels must happen. But once you start reading the manual, you start understading how to use and combining things, and start to think like a builder. You can do almost anything in RT. It's like cooking. Today a lot of work is akin to choosing food from a menu, and choosing sides. But to cook, you need to learn a few principles, practice them, and then the limit is your imagination.

* (C) Myself, All Rights Reswerved

My mother worked in technical writing for software products. She explained that the main difficulty she found with her job was that the engineers who were advising her were generally most taken with the things they designed, how they were coded and how they worked. The had next to no orientation to the user and what the user needed to learn, and in what order the user needed to learn it, to make the software perform the functions they needed. Writing documentation that really embraces the needs of the user is rare enough in TV sets and AV receivers--it's almost always missing in documenting complex software.

That's different about RT: the documentation is unusual in its orientation to function and to photography. When the underlying details are discussed they enhance the understanding of functionality rather than being someone's proud exposition of how and why he/she loved coding it.

 

[fferreres]

Unfortunately won't run on any of my computers. Maybe they should release a 32 bit version.

An explanation and possible solutions for 32-bit processors is here:

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/The_Floating_Point_Engine

The manual is good and pretty darned complete. Useful for those interested in understanding RT.

I agree fully on this. While we have largely moved to a society of "intuitive-everything"* what has really happened is that functionality that isn't instantly intuitive is eliminated or automated, with whatever the designer feels must happen. But once you start reading the manual, you start understading how to use and combining things, and start to think like a builder. You can do almost anything in RT. It's like cooking. Today a lot of work is akin to choosing food from a menu, and choosing sides. But to cook, you need to learn a few principles, practice them, and then the limit is your imagination.

* (C) Myself, All Rights Reswerved

My mother worked in technical writing for software products. She explained that the main difficulty she found with her job was that the engineers who were advising her were generally most taken with the things they designed, how they were coded and how they worked. The had next to no orientation to the user and what the user needed to learn, and in what order the user needed to learn it, to make the software perform the functions they needed. Writing documentation that really embraces the needs of the user is rare enough in TV sets and AV receivers--it's almost always missing in documenting complex software.

That's different about RT: the documentation is unusual in its orientation to function and to photography. When the underlying details are discussed they enhance the understanding of functionality rather than being someone's proud exposition of how and why he/she loved coding it.

It's true. The RT manual has been a pleasant surprise. Really 3 minutes, and I can understand a tool rather quickly. It's very practical and designed to make the reader productive, and always trying to demystify some things (eg. what other tools can do the same, if it is applied before or after, and some examples).

The pedia is a key reason I didn't give up on RT!

 

[Tom_N]

Unfortunately won't run on any of my computers. Maybe they should release a 32 bit version.

I don't believe that they are releasing 32-bit versions any more.

They released several 32-bit Windows XP versions. The most recent seems to be v5.0-r1, from February 2017. There was also a 32-bit Linux release (v2.4.1) in September 2009.