RawTherapee in conjunction with GIMP: the choice of losers or work tools amateur photographer?
I’ll immediately reveal the intrigue: to the question asked in the title, I will no doubt give the second of the proposed answers. It would be strange if the whole article was devoted to the “choice of a loser”, right? In my opinion, the "choice of a loser" is a pirated Adobe Photoshop with a pirated Lightroom as a developer. No, I do not support the idea of paid software (software); on the contrary, I am entirely in favor of curtailing and limiting the appetites of commercial companies, especially those that de facto claim a monopoly in a certain area. But to deal with these excesses is much more correct not by “piracy and theft”, but by purely economic methods, first of all, by comprehensive expansion of the assortment and scope of using various kinds of free and open source software. RawTherapee developer and GIMP photo editor, which are discussed in the article below, relate specifically to freeware software; meanwhile, their functionality is almost inferior in nothing, and in some places it significantly surpasses the functionality of a recognized leader. (Yes, I remember about the eight-bit color in GIMP. This will be discussed below!) It is only important to use it properly.
The following material can not be considered, perhaps, neither a review, nor a brief instruction on the combination of the two products mentioned. Rather, it is a set of assumptions about exactly how an amateur photographer who wants to get high-quality processing of his digital images at the output can use RawTherapee and GIMP for this purpose, avoiding the traditional bottlenecks in this bundle.
I warn you in advance that I proceed from the following assumptions verified by practice:
• The main operations performed by the amateur photographer occur at the time of shooting. Graphic editors for photos in the strict sense of the word are needed only for a number of post-processing operations: debayerization (demosaicing), post-Buyer or situational sharpening, white balance correction, histograms and geometry (including cropping in this last point).
• Deep retouching of a photo, as in the film era, in amateur conditions pursues strictly defined goals and cannot be considered an obligatory component of any photo. Meanwhile, tools for retouching should always be at hand, and to refuse retouching “for the sake of naturalness of shots” means to make yourself dependent on chance and the vagaries of technology.
Further, I consider RawTherapee as the main tool for basic photo correction, and GIMP almost exclusively as a means of retouching.
Rawtherapee
This developer exists for all major platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and, as far as I can tell from import blogs, it is installed on * BSD with some effort. At the time of writing, the main version of RawTherapee has an index of 4.0. It should be noted that the functionality of the program, as well as its interface, is significantly complicated from version to version, requiring in some cases a clear understanding of which algorithm he wants to use to process or improve the image. So, during the initial development (debayerization), in addition to the standard amaze algorithm, another 9 processing options for Bayer mosaics are used to choose from (you can read more about these algorithms here ):
In terms of controlling the processing algorithms, RawTherapee is perhaps “ahead of the rest”. This may be considered a drawback - in a more traditional editor, you upload an image, move a couple of sliders and get a finished result, but then when you use the same traditional editor, you usually hear whining: either the sharpness is not enough, then the colors go, then artifacts come out, and even the most cherished - “the matrix / lens does not fully reveal its advantages!”. And it doesn’t matter that most of these advantages are purely imaginary - it’s much more convenient to blame other people's eyes for this than your crooked hands and low-quality software that can’t extract what the photographer needs. With RawTherapee this number will not work. If you don’t like the way the program performs an action,
It should be noted, however, that novice amateurs who decide to shoot in RAW may not worry about the insufficient level of their knowledge. The default settings in RawTherapee are very good, and you can take pictures without touching anything.
The colors of the developer by default are high-quality, but boring, with the correct picture, close to the natural perception. Here, in terms of the subtleties of pastel shades, SilkyPix, perhaps, has gone far ahead, but Aperture and Lightroom are still inferior to the program in question. However, the taste and color of all the markers are different, and the purpose of this article is to combat prejudice, and not with personal preferences. Therefore, I will not advertise the subjective aspects of perception, as I will not contradict the well-known superstition that “any colors can be wound in any converter” (in fact, the quality and purity of color almost exclusively depend on the color separation on the matrix). It is enough to say only that with the colors RawTherapee either does not lie or lies unnoticed and pleasant to the eye. ICC profiles used in the program without additional conversion,
A separate and important advantage of RawTherapee is its delicate, finely tuned noise reduction algorithm. In the latest versions of the Shumodav program, you can get sharp and clear pictures from the old Olympus on the Kodak matrix at ISO 800 (anyone who knows what I’ll understand will understand).
Naturally, the program is equipped with tools for editing the geometry of the image, both with cropping and with filling the frame space. In the latter case, I did not notice any significant deterioration in the sharpness and detail of the images at the edges when turning through an angle of up to 5-7 degrees. By the way, this feature can also be used to edit JPEG files; in general, RawTherapee treats JPEG and RAW as completely equal, and non-destructive editing operations applied to digital negatives can equally well be applied to JPEGs. At the same time, as it should be for a good developer, all editing operations are not applied to the source file, but are written to a special action file (having the same name as the original, but with an additional extension),
RawTherapee has the functions of cataloging (highlighting files in a group with a color marker, as well as rating in "stars"), batch development and deletion. Also, a single processed file with the click of a button can be transferred to an external graphics editor; as such editors, Photoshop, GIMP or some other editor can be connected to RawTherapee (in the latter case, the program will ask you to specify the path to its executable file).
In principle, the basic methods of using RawTherapee as a developer (both batch and “pulling” individual files) deserve a separate article.
Here, they may ask me to be objective and to talk about the shortcomings of RawTherapee. I will not be objective; I do not see such shortcomings that it would be worth talking about. In the end, I am not writing advertising material and not a review, but a theoretical justification for a particular method. I will discuss the limitations of the method itself below, but this is not a reason to scold a product that did not offend me. If RawTherapee has flaws, then without me there will be enough critics who will gladly reveal this topic.
Important for further presentation is the fact that RawTherapee works without problems with a 16-bit color model, using correctly 12- and 14-bit RAW files from modern cameras. The program also supports various color models and color spaces. I draw attention to this fact, because if in this section we talked about the merits of RawTherapee, then in the next chapter we can not touch on the significant shortcomings of GIMP!
GIMP as a sequel to RawTherapee
With this program, everything is much more complicated than with the previous one. On the one hand, GIMP is a full-fledged graphical editor, with support for layers and overlays, filters, a built-in Lanczos resizing algorithm (goodbye, multiple bicubic resize at 10% followed by intelligent sharpe!), A full range of color management functions and support for a variety of scripts . On the other hand, there are no adjustment layers in GIMP, color models like Lab (it is gradually being introduced into extensions, by the way), outlines are not automatically extracted, some other tools are missing ... But all the mentioned GIMP shortcomings fade before one, the main one.
GIMP can only work with eight-bit color depth!
In other words, this editor supports the JPEG color model, but with RAW and, more importantly, with TIFF, this focus no longer passes. The promises of the 16-bit GIMP have been heard for ten years, but the matter has not moved forward. Transferring a RAW file processed by RawTherapee to GIMP, you will certainly see a message about the need to convert an intermediate 16-bit TIFF file to 8-bit format.
This wonderful problem can lead the photographer into a stupor. Embossed colors and shadows, a ruled histogram after the slightest correction of brightness and posterization on unevenly lit surfaces (especially noticeable in the sky) - these are typical consequences of working with eight-bit color depth! All this terrifies the photographer, especially if he has already read a little specialized literature and reviews on the forums, and takes him away from the idea of trying GIMP ever.
Meanwhile, everything is not so bad. Firstly, an embossed histogram is much more often the result of crooked hands when shooting than the result of poor-quality processing. Believe me in this matter! Secondly, posterization often creeps out in Lightroom too, being more often not the result of insufficient color depth, but the result of overly energetic clipping and the desire to reduce all the curves to the S-shaped shape so beloved by the customer. And thirdly, by correctly using all the benefits of RawTherapee, you can generally minimize all this headache with color depth.
The method of use is simple and obvious. All operations with curves, clipping, brightness, etc., as well as with the geometry of images, are performed only in RawTherapee, after which the intermediate result is transferred to GIMP for final rendering, fine retouching, etc. In essence, in this case, all the work on Creating a digital image relies on RawTherapee resources, while GIMP serves almost exclusively to remove individual defects by drawing. The advantages of RawTherapee here are non-destructive editing (allowing you to partially eliminate the need for adjustment layers), a 16-bit color model and precise control of all the development and file improvement algorithms. GIMP has its undoubted advantages: free, simple and convenient interface while maintaining a powerful set of editing tools.
This way of organizing work is very different from that adopted in the Lightroom / Aperture + Photoshop bundle, where the discovery of a digital negative is usually accompanied only by a minimal correction of white balance, noise and geometry, after which the file is transferred for further development in Photoshop, where the main work is done.
Here, by the way, we have not only a difference in the ways of working, but also a kind of conflict of ideologies. Photoshop, by definition, is a program for digitally processing images through their creation, drawing. In the Photoshop workflow, the focus is not so much on the art of the photographer as on the artistic skill of a professional armed with a tablet and a 30 ”calibrated monitor. It's fine. But this is not quite the same as taking photographs; this state is much closer to painting, or, more precisely, to classical graphics. It is no accident that in the mass slang “photoshop”, “photoshopped” are a kind of synonyms of the unreal, created by the imagination visual series.
On the contrary, the described process “RawTherapee + GIMP”, although it allows you to intervene in photography by means of retouching and image adjustment, is extremely broad, but it is still based on bringing “to mind” real, captured frames. Logical continuation of such an ideology could be shooting in camera JPEG, but here the question rests not so much on ideological limitations as on technical ones (most of the in-camera JPEG processing algorithms, noise reduction, color correction, etc. are still quite ugly!). Therefore, a free bunch of GIMP and RawTherapee can more than suit even a demanding photographer, provided that he is still a photographer, and not an artist who uses photos only as starting material for free imagination.
Conclusion
Being a fan of GIMP, I hope that sooner or later, developers will include three main elements in it, the absence of which in the middle of the first quarter of the 21st century makes us a photo editor user: Lab color model, 16-bit color space and adjustment layers. But while this is just fantastic, and the price of a full set of Photoshop + Lightroom and a good tablet for them is comparable to the price of a top SLR camera, the lover can only get the best from alternative programs for developing and processing digital images, such as the excellent RPP for Mac OS X, or RawTherapee reviewed here.
In general, I am firmly convinced that photography both in film and in the digital era occurs at the moment you press the camera shutter, and all subsequent editing and retouching is nothing more than a necessary evil from time to time. Therefore, the possibilities of free developers are now more than enough for comfortable work with captured images, and you can remove a speck of dust from the sky in the landscape or a random pimple from the skin in the portrait in the simplest editors, not to mention the great and powerful GIMP. The above bunch of RawTherapee and GIMP was always completely enough for me to photograph; if I want to do painting, there are completely different tools at my service, and the photographer’s camera has nothing to do with it.
So, using the software mentioned in this article, the amateur photographer receives photos with guaranteed quality (provided that he understands what he is doing, of course). But to pay or not to pay for the additional functions of Photoshop is, of course, a personal necessity and taste.