FOSS raw photo editors, Darktable & Raw Therapee, feature heavily on my channel.
I'm a professional image editing trainer, landscape, wildlife and natural history photographer from Cheshire in the UK, who has been making pictures for a living for over 40 years.
With my years of experience, I now have the privilege of teaching photography to those who want to learn both the art and the science of this amazing medium.
Also, having worked with Adobe Photoshop since the days of 'BarneyScan XP', I have become a specialist trainer of both it, and Adobe Lightroom. I also teach master fine art print making, and advise on colour management policies to both corporate and private individuals.
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As of writing this, I can't seem to access your folder of profile files... however, RawTherapee 5.10 on Linux Mint 22 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based) has a LOT of camera DCP profiles included... LOTS. Most common cameras seem to be included including Nikon Mirrorless and DSLR, and bunch of Sony and Canon gear as well. So check your system first.
Hi Andy, I asked you about ART a couple of years ago and you shared your problems with using it on the Mac. I have been using it quite regularly and have found several of its features more useful than similar things on Rawtherapee. I would appreciate your doing more videos on ART, especially on the various aspects of the Local editing tab. Many thanks for your sharing of what you have learned. You are a great resource! Richard
By metadata I take it you mean EXIF and IPTC? Camera data, title,caption, description and keywords can all be entered for an image, and export with the image no problem. Keywording is possibly the poorly thought out and executed - certainly not the easiest I've used - but it does work.
Hello Andy, I just saw your interesting video about ART and creating a BASE.arp. I am going to look into it. I always used Rawtherapee and I tried Darktable the other day, but I find it too complicated. So I am thinking of using ART as my main RAW editor. However, I have a problem, when exporting a photo to jpg, the X and Y resolution is 180. I want that to be 300, but I do not see where I can change that. Do you have a solution? Many thanks, Roel
Thanks Andy. I have used ART a couple of years ago, but then I ran into Darktable and stuck to that, not that I found it much better then ART, but mostly because I spent so much time learning to work with it. But having watched this video, I have re-installed ART now and will start using it again.
Thank you Andy. A very timely video. I'll watch and give ART another go. I looked at it briefly a while ago but didn't do much with it because I couldn't be bothered to work out why the Black slider in the Tone Equaliser didn't do much.
I migrated from darktable to ART about two years ago although I keep playing with darktable. One little ART nugget that I like (once I paid attention and noticed it!) is the ability to gradually build up brush masks by using Ctrl+brush (I assume that's Cmd+brush on Mac) with a feathered / low-opacity brush. That more closely approximates the LR / ACR adjustment brush approach than anything I've so far found in RT or dt. Quite often I use Color Similarity masks and then fine-tune them with a Brush mask. The ability to name adjustment layers is nice. The recent addition of CTL scripts has drastically expanded local editing options, although to be honest more documentation on what they actually do would be most welcome. 🙂 I also added dynamic profile rules to add custom lens profiles for my lenses, which I created using the Adobe Len Profile Creation Tool, as well as rules to apply auto-cropping to images with in-camera crops applied (since Canon doesn't actually crop in-camera). One seemingly minor thing I did -- which is a subtle but nice tweak -- is to install and use the Google Inter font in the UI. Glad to see you working with ART and looking forward to more.
I'm going to watch later and do a follow along. I actually prefer the layout of RT & ART, but I know you've mentioned before that DT is more better/intuitive/can't remember what you said aha
Played around with earlier releases of ART and I liked it. It is a fork of a earlier version so I always wonder what features are missing from each since it did not look like they were merging code. I want to say ART lets you save different versions in the companion file so you can come back and have say different color and BnW versions. Glad to see options out there.
It is not meant to be merged back, even though some features can be ported back individually. There are too much changes, like the pipeline itself and the drop of many rarely used features. I'll miss the Lab tool, but there is so much more in ART than what is explained here, that I switched to it.
Thanks for the tutorial. I usually use D&S presets. I like Darktable because it's the program that gives me the most pleasure in editing photos. Unfortunately the sharpening functions are the biggest drawback of this program. No matter how I try different settings, the photo is always bland or overly and artificially sharpened. I cannot get to a point where the sharpness is good. In RT, for example, all I have to do is turn on the focus function and I'm done. The sharpness in Rawtherapee is perfect! I don't even want to mention the tool in Darktable D&S, which is completely incomprehensible and very complicated. It is probably the worst DT module.
Shortly (next few hours) I'll upload my first ART video - I'm really loving ART now it works on Mac - 3 places to actually SHARPEN plus intuitive masking that actually works. Local edits with multiple iterations and masking - what more could you want!??!
Many thanks for your video. It very informative. But let me ask two questions: 1) Isn't filmic (and sigmoid as well) supposed to do roughly the same automatically, i.e., lower the saturation in highlights and shadows and set it to zero in white/black (where white and black is defined by these modules)? 2) (Sorry, this is an offtopic.) Do you use darktable on macOS Sequoia? Is opencl still working there? I'm about to upgrade but I worry about Apple dropping the support. Based on my experience with Linux, using darktable on CPU is miserable compared to GPU.
Hi Michal, cheers for the feedback 👍 Filmic - yes, but it's yet more "stuff" to learn for someone not familiar with the inner workings of DT. I am currently running DT in the latest version of Sonoma - as always, I resist upgrading my OS until I know that it doesn't effect Photoshop, Lightroom Classic etc and that FOSS dev builds are out there that can cope with it too. DT builds are usually fine with an OS change, but I still run Raw Therapee, which sometimes lags behind a bit, and I'm currently playing with ART, which I'm loving for its simplicity. My attitude to upgrading is "if it ain't broke, don't be in a rush to fix it"! I'll be spending the next few days checking what works and what perhaps does not; always let other folk find the bugs!
One thing I'd be interested in is a comparison between the saturation mask technique and setting up filmic so that it desaturates shadows and highlights. Or how they affect each other when used together. One obvious difference is that filmic happens as the last thing before leaving scene referred, so the color balance module can't take that into account... but I'm not sure what the implications are.
Hi Tom, as I replied to Michal, I try and keep things simple and familiar for the likes of Photoshop users. And making a mask is more "recognisable" than setting up a module intance, and it's more versatile. Am always open to suggestions on how to do things though Tom, as I never profess to being a DT expert!
Thank you Andy for a detailed to the point tutorial. Your training is precise to the point and on target. Your contribution to photographers is truly outstanding. This software (both Rawtherapee and Darktable) are not for the faint hearted. This software is simply one out of the box. You often say on your Video training " I go on to much", I disagree you seem patient calm and humble and seem to have a deep respect and love for this software. I have watched and studied software training videos, most of these videos are also ok but do not suit my learning style, which is no fault them. Darktable is a huge software package that is not designed for people that want fleeting quick processing but for determined individuals that want all the tools the create different outcomes and effects. I find your realistic approach to photography very refreshing, turning a flat raw image into what we perceived as real at that moment when the capture occurred. I feel and its just subjective that ai is taking the art of photography away which saddens me immensely. Digital software has broadened my appreciation of the individuals that process film and print as they had limited tools and needed to become a chemist to become expert printers. I have seen and heard many criticisms of both RawTherapy and Darktable, but I have found with your encouragement and patients a real surprise in every module in both Rawtherapee and darktable, it's a journey of discovery almost like the anticipation of taking your first transparency photo. Regards Rob P.s. I hope in Rawtherapee in the future they incorporate and duplicate image feature to approach different processing styles, to the same image to do comparisons to compare the pipeline outcomes.
One thing to note Andy and many people have no idea is that 0 to 1 in Jz is not full-scale. You highlights can often be at 2 3 5 or higher. You need to use the picker and sample the highlights and note the value. Then use the mask boost slider to make sure it bumps Jz higher allowing you to select the full range of the image... Many people have complained about masking using Jz and it not working well with highlights....this is why
Interesting. The Darktable Landscapes channel also did a recent video on processing an image with only color balance RGB (mostly -- He also used crop and some sharpening). cbrgb is a powerful tool, no doubt.
Boris did a video years ago when the new version of CB came out...he did about 5 edits using only RGB CB only to show the power of it . Good to revisit things and put a different spin from time to time
Darktable is a very powerful program. But I have not found any videos on how to use darktable for focus stacking image. If you can do it, it would be very interesting to watch such a video.
Darktable does not do focus stacking natively - but if you install Hugin and use a LUA script, it can be done - except on my machine for some reason. Tried to get it running on my mac many times but I never quite seem to manage it!
It works fine on Fuji MF files, but they are Bayer sensors, so no surprise there. I presume you mean Fuji XTrans, and not owning one of those I can't say really. Some folk say both Lr and DXO do a better job on them than they used to.
Hi Andy, Thank you so very much. I Can not understand why you do not have many more viewers? Even though I have only seen a couple of your videos yet you are absolutely my new favorite. I had many questions regarding the softproofing and printing process and you gave me many really good answers I cound not found elsewhere. Stay cool!
Hi, for those of you trying to learn by following this tutorial, on Rawtherapee's version 5.11 (Aug. 2024), the Transition Gradient options are different, no Feather Gradient (Grad. Filters) is available, because they moved it to the Graduated Filter tab/arrow. Thanks for the hard work on these videos, @Andy Astbury
I have 10,000 raw photo stucked in Aperture when Apple said they are done with it. I have another 10,000 raw photos stucked in LR with Adobe turned toxic. I have enought of the bean counting accountant ruled software company, I feel safer with Darktable as it is open source. As long as millions of people keep using it, someone can keep it running.
The excluding spot is really nice. Before that video I just assumed it's inverse, so it affects anything outside of the ellipse or rectangle you draw. Thanks!
30:12 And to better mimic the mixer principle, hover a vertical bar and start dragging it vertically, it will be constrained to a vertical movement, so you'll be able to raise or lower the effect on a colour without deriving to another colour. Great explanation of that curves Andy !
Each to their own. A lot of togs who produce many images from different scenarios would be lost without a catalogue, because it's a database that is searchable. When you do 8 hours of wildlife photography you can quite easily go home with 7 to 9 thousand shots. Try doing that twice week and managing it all without a database.
RawTherapee is generally good, but compared to Darktable it has no masking system. Also Darktable is more accessible imo and have more interesting tools.
