RawTherapee in conjunction with GIMP: the choice of losers or work tools amateur?

Immediately I will reveal the intrigue: to the question asked in the title, I no doubt give the second of the suggested answers. It would be strange if the whole article was devoted to “choosing a loser”, isn't it? In my opinion, the “choice of a loser” is a pirated Adobe Photoshop with the pirated Lightroom as a developer. No, I do not support the idea of ​​paid software (software); on the contrary, I am totally in favor of curtailing and limiting the appetites of commercial companies, especially those that de facto claim 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 all-round expansion of the range and scope of using all sorts of free and open-source software. The RawTherapee developer and GIMP photo editor, which are discussed in the article below, are related to free software; meanwhile, their functionality is almost in no way inferior, and in some places considerably surpasses the functionality of a recognized leader. (Yes, I remember the eight-bit color in the 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’s a set of assumptions about exactly how a photo amateur who wants to get high quality processing of their digital images on 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 proven by practice:

• The main operations performed by the amateur photographer, occur at the time of shooting. Graphic editors for a photo in the strict sense of the word are needed only for a number of post-processing operations: debayer (demosaic), post Bayer or situational sharpening, white balance correction, histogram and geometry (including framing in this last paragraph).
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• Deep photo retouching, as in the film era, pursues strictly defined goals in amateur conditions and cannot be considered as an indispensable component of any photo. Meanwhile, tools for retouching should always be on hand, and to refuse to retouch “for the sake of naturalness of images” means to make yourself dependent on chance and the vagaries of technology.

Next, I view RawTherapee as the main tool for basic image correction, and GIMP almost exclusively as a retouching tool.

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 also installed on * BSD with some effort. At the time of this 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, becomes much more complicated from version to version, requiring in some cases a clear understanding from the user of exactly what algorithm he wants to use to process or improve the image. So, during the initial development (debayerization), in addition to the standard amaze algorithm, 9 more options for processing Bayer mosaics are used to choose from (more details about these algorithms can be found here ):



In terms of control over the processing algorithms RawTherapee, perhaps, "ahead of the rest." This can be considered a disadvantage - in a more traditional editor you load an image, move a couple of sliders and get the finished result - but then using that traditional editor usually starts whining: the sharpness is not enough, the colors go, then the artifacts are splayed, and even the most cherished - "the matrix / lens does not fully reveal its advantages!". And it does not matter that most of these advantages are purely imaginary - it is much more convenient to blame others' eyes for this, than your crooked hands and poor-quality software, which is unable to extract what the photographer needs. With RawTherapee this number will not work. If you do not like the way the program performs this or that action, you can forcefully use a different algorithm or change the parameters of the existing one, until the result starts to make you happy.

It should be said, however, that beginners who decide to shoot in RAW, can not worry about the lack of their knowledge. The default settings in RawTherapee are very good, and you can take pictures without touching anything.

The default colors of the developer are qualitative, but boring, with a correct, close to natural perception of the picture. Here, on the subtlety of the transfer of pastels, 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 fight against prejudices, not personal preferences. Therefore, I will not advertise the subjective aspects of perception, just as I will not for the time being contradict the well-known superstition that “in any color converter you can wind up anything” (in fact, the quality and purity of the color almost exclusively depends on the color separation on the matrix). Suffice it to say that with RawTherapee flowers either does not lie, or lies imperceptibly and pleasing to the eye. ICC profiles used in the program without additional conversion, facilitate the task of building the correct color rendition.

A separate and important advantage of RawTherapee is a delicate, precisely adjustable noise reduction algorithm. In the latest versions of the “shumodav” program, you can get sharp and clean pictures from the old “Olympus” on the Kodak matrix at ISO 800 (who knows what I will understand).

Naturally, the program is equipped with tools for editing the image geometry, both with cropping and filling the frame space. In the latter case, I did not notice any significant deterioration in the sharpness and detail of the images along the edges when turning at an angle of up to 5-7 degrees. By the way, this feature can also be used to edit JPEG files; in general, RawTherapee takes JPEG and RAW to be completely equal, and “non-destructive editing” operations applied to digital negatives can be equally applied to JPEG here. At the same time, as it should be for a good developer, all editing operations are not applied to the source file, but are recorded in a special action file (having the same name as the original one, but with an additional extension), and are only finally used when transferring the file to the final one. development / conversion.

RawTherapee has the functions of cataloging (highlighting files by group with a color marker, as well as rating in "asterisks"), batch development and deletion. Also, a single file to be processed can be transferred to an external graphical editor by pressing one button; 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 (as a batch, and for “pulling out” individual files, deserve a separate article.

Here I can be asked to be objective and tell about the shortcomings of RawTherapee. I will not be objective; I do not see such shortcomings, which would be worth talking about. In the end, I am not writing promotional material or a review, but a theoretical rationale for a particular method. I will talk about the limitations of the method itself below, but this is no reason to scold a product that has not offended me in any way. If RawTherapee has flaws, then without me there will be enough critics who will gladly cover this topic.

Important for further discussion is the fact that RawTherapee works without problems with the 16-bit color model, quite correctly using 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 it will be impossible not to touch upon the essential shortcomings of GIMP!

GIMP as a continuation of RawTherapee

With this program, everything is much more complicated than the previous one. On the one hand, GIMP is a full-fledged graphical editor, with support for layers and overlays, filters, Lanczos’s built-in resizing algorithm (goodbye, 10% bicubic resizing multiple times, followed by intelligent sharps!), A full set of color management functions and support for various scripts . On the other hand, in GIMP there are no adjustment layers, color models like Lab (it is gradually being introduced into extensions, by the way), contours are not automatically extracted, there are still some tools missing ... But all the GIMP disadvantages mentioned fade before one, the main one.

GIMP can only work with eight-bit color depth!

In other words, the JPEG color model supports this editor, but with RAW and, more importantly, with TIFF this focus no longer passes. The promises of a 16-bit GIMP have been heard for ten years, but the matter has not shifted from the dead center. By transferring the 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 an 8-bit format.



This remarkable problem can lead a photographer into a stupor. Embossed colors and shadows, bar graphs 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 horrifies the photographer, especially if he has already read a lot of specialized literature and reviews on the forums, and leads him away from the very idea of ​​trying GIMP.

Meanwhile, everything is not so bad. First, an embossed histogram is much more often the result of crooked hands when shooting than the result of poor processing. Believe me in this matter! Secondly, posterization often comes out in Lightroom, being more often not the result of insufficient color depth, but the result of too vigorous clipping and the desire to reduce all the curves to an S-shape so loved by the customer for “brightness”. And thirdly, correctly using all the advantages 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, small retouching, etc. In essence, all the work on Digital imaging relies on RawTherapee resources, while GIMP almost exclusively serves to remove individual defects by drawing. The advantages of RawTherapee include non-destructive editing (allowing partially to eliminate the need for corrective layers), a 16-bit color model and precise control of all up to a single development and improvement algorithms of the file. For GIMP remain its undoubted advantages: free of charge, simplicity and convenience of the interface while maintaining a powerful set of editing tools. Automation of RawTherapee with GIMP provides comfort when working.

This way of organizing work is very different from that adopted in Lightroom / Aperture + Photoshop, where the opening 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 revision to Photoshop, where the main work is done.

Here, by the way, we have not only a difference in the methods of work, but also a kind of conflict of ideologies. Photoshop, by definition, is a program for digitally processing images by building them up, drawing them. In the workflow with the participation of Photoshop, the emphasis is not so much on the art of the photographer, but on the artistic skill of a professional armed with a tablet and a 30 ”calibrated monitor. It's fine. But this is not exactly the same thing as taking photos; This state is much closer to painting, or, more precisely, to classical graphics. It is not by chance that in the mass slang “photoshop”, “photoshop” is a kind of synonym for the unreal, created by the imagination of the visual series.

On the contrary, the described process “RawTherapee + GIMP”, although it allows to interfere with photography by means of retouching and adjusting images extremely widely, but it is still based on bringing to life the real, captured frames. A logical continuation of such an ideology can 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 cancellation, color correction, etc. are still quite ugly!). Therefore, a free bundle of GIMP and RawTherapee is more than capable of arranging even a demanding photographer, provided that he is still a photographer, and not an artist, who uses the photo only as a starting material for the free flight of fancy.

Conclusion

Being a fan of GIMP, I hope that sooner or later the developers will include three main elements in it, the absence of which in the middle of the first quarter of the 21st century takes the photo editor user out: the Lab color model, 16-bit color space and adjustment layers. But for now this is just fiction, and the price of a complete set of Photoshop + Lightroom and a good tablet for them is comparable to the price of a top-end SLR camera, the amateur can only extract the best from alternative software developing and processing digital images, such as the excellent RPP for Mac OS X, or reviewed here is RawTherapee.

In general, I am firmly convinced that photography in both the film and digital era occurs at the moment when the camera shutter is depressed, and all subsequent editing and retouching is no more than necessary evil from time to time. Therefore, the possibilities of free developers are now more than enough for comfortable work with the captured images, and you can remove a speck of dust from the sky on the landscape or a random pimple from the skin of the portrait in the most simple editors, not to mention the great and powerful GIMP. The combination of RawTherapee and GIMP described above has always been completely enough for me to photograph; if I want to do painting, my services are completely different tools, and the photographer’s camera has nothing to do with it.

So, using the software products mentioned in this note, the amateur photographer receives photos with guaranteed quality (assuming that he understands what he is doing, of course). And to pay or not to pay for additional functions of Photoshop is, of course, a matter of personal need and taste.