Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://rawtherapee.com/ Version 5.6 Price: Free!
Before I continue this short series on Rawtherapee, know that editing large RAW photos requires a lot of memory. I recommend 8GB or more. This simple picture we have been playing with, is taking up 1.6GB of memory on my computer inside Rawtherapee.
I hope you kept the last picture we were working on as we will be continuing where we left off.
March 2020 it seems wesaturate.com has broke: the file is now hosted on the FCM servers here: https://bit.ly/2WNVfPf
Last time, I had you playing with tone mapping and sort of sent you off to try out the vignette filter. Now let us load the picture and move to the detail section, short-cut key alt+d.
The very last option on the right side panel should be “Haze removal”. What this does is sharpen the picture slightly by adding saturation. Feel free to play with the sliders, until it pleases your eyes. I believe in the “less is more” approach, but if you want to have one of those dramatic HDR oversampled pictures, this is where you do it. You can dramatically decrease the white parts, and fill them with color. Some people like this sort of thing. Boost your depth to 30, and the strength to 70, and see. Do not forget to turn the effect on and off via the ‘power’ button. What this does work well with: sunsets, and sunrise, with lots of dirty clouds. With lots of colors, you get a surreal landscape that can either make your brain hurt or fire your imagination! You can press ctrl+s to save and export maybe as a JPG (this is up to you).
In our case, we only want 20/20. We do NOT want to save it as JPG as we want to continue editing and make a wallpaper for a smartphone or something. They say hindsight is 20/20 vision, so let us see if this improves our picture?
Our 70/30 over dramatised picture XD
Okay, back to editing. Press alt+c (or choose the next icon) for the color profile. We want to bring out the yellow a bit more like the over dramatized picture, but we do not want it to look as garish. This is where ‘vibrance’ comes in. Turn on vibrance, and drag the slider to more-or-less where you like it. This algorithm takes a lot of processing power and may take a second to complete. Now that you are ‘almost there’, you can use the plus and minus buttons to tweak your picture. There may be a system sound beep when processing has finished. I will bring mine up to 30 or 40, because, why not. We are learning HOW TO and we need to see what things do.
Tip: Often press the ‘z’ key to zoom in 100% once you have applied some tool. Things may look great in the overview, but become a dog’s basket when zoomed in.
So we can look at our light source close up. It seems we have fallen in the ‘nice from afar and far from nice’ trap. Light sources are a good indication of the overall health of your photo. Oh no, our poor photo has more speckles than a dalmatian!
Your homework, this issue, is to try what we are doing here on one of your own photos!
To fix this, we need to go back to the detail tab. Use the short-cut keys for extra credit.
The obvious choice is noise reduction. As with the previous tool. Noise reduction is processing intensive, so if you turn it on and do not see anything happening, look at the bottom left and you will see a progress bar with the words “processing”. Let it finish. You will see three sliders, ‘Gamma’, ‘Luminance’ and ‘Detail recovery’. The last one you do not really want to use, so pay attention to your details as we move the Luminance slider. We have a conundrum, what is good for the clouds is not good for the water. As you smooth the clouds, you lose detail in the water, so be careful with this slider. Stick with the less-is-more-philosophy and your pictures will look more natural. I went with 1.25 Gamma and 4.0 Luminance to smooth out my picture. Sometimes you want a bit of grain, just keep that in mind. A good detail edit changes things at 100% zoom, but no visible difference zoomed out.
Tip: sample at least three (3) places around your photo when doing detail / color editing.
Okay, I am happy with my picture for now. It may require more editing for a different mood modification again later, and this is the great thing about editing RAW pictures. I can now even save my “steps” (if you will) and apply that to another picture. This is very handy for batch editing. As I mentioned before, I would like this picture on my smartphone. I do not want all the open spaces as it is a small screen. Press alt+t to go to the crop tab. As soon as you turn on crop, you will notice a dotted line around your picture. This picture is in a landscape format, and I need it in a portrait format for my phone. The line with “Lock ratio” has two drop-down boxes. Change the second one to portrait. You should see a portrait rectangle on your screen. To move it, use the shift key in conjunction with your mouse. When you are done, you can save it as a JPG to send to your phone.
That’s it for this issue, join us again for more post-processing fun in the next issue of FCM.