RawTherapee: I started trying out RawTherapee, but I'm not thrilled with it. It's not at all intuitive. I like to look at processing alternatives, and the price was right. :sm02: I'll...

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I started trying out RawTherapee, but I'm not thrilled with it. It's not at all intuitive. I like to look at processing alternatives, and the price was right.

I'll play around with it a bit more and then try something else. LR is my go-to processor.

bobmcculloch Loc: NYC, NY

TO be honest I've stopped trying other programs out, I've centered on PSP for the last few years, does it all for me , reasonable price, no mandatory upgrades, lots of on line help. All I need.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

bobmcculloch wrote:

TO be honest I've stopped trying other programs out, I've centered on PSP for the last few years, does it all for me , reasonable price, no mandatory upgrades, lots of on line help. All I need.

Does that require a lengthy installation number? Do they limit the number of installations? Do you have Pro or Ultimate?

EDIT: I'm impatient. I downloaded Ultimate. Thanks for the recommendation.

jcryan Loc: Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic

When I started developing raw 2-3 years ago I tried a number of open source software options including Raw Therapee and quickly settled on Darktable. There is a learning curve but excellent YouTube tutorials from Bruce Williams, Rico Richardson and others will help.

I addition to excellent results I love the organizational tools in the LightTable that can help organize and assess your photos.

a6k Loc: Detroit & Sanibel

Darktable:

I find it very difficult to use but that is probably because the UI is very, very different from other programs. That may be, in part, because it's designed to run on all OS platforms so it doesn't use a UI from them, just its own.

There is a lot of help available on the internet but I am happier with something that doesn't require quite so much of that (such as CaptureOne which is not at all free).

That said, I have been finding some very nice features. I especially like that it lets you look at the raw image accurately and optionally apply the camera's JPG curve. It's an amazing program and seems to work well as a part of a set that includes RawDigger, FastRawViewer and itself.

I have tried it and RawTherapee and they both have the UI issue. I have found DT somewhat less buggy, somewhat less crash prone. MacOS in my case.

The price is right and it offers a lot. There are features in it for which I don't even understand the terminology. I think it is worth a try.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

jerryc41 wrote:

Does that require a lengthy installation number? Do they limit the number of installations? Do you have Pro or Ultimate?

EDIT: I'm impatient. I downloaded Ultimate. Thanks for the recommendation.

With the Ultimate, there are seven different programs, and each has its own huge serial number and installation process. One of them has a subscription renewal next year. I've already asked how to cancel that. It would have been nice if one installation covered all of "Ultimate." Now I have a lot of new software to play with.

fjrwillie Loc: MA

jerryc41 wrote:

I started trying out RawTherapee, but I'm not thrilled with it. It's not at all intuitive. I like to look at processing alternatives, and the price was right.

I'll play around with it a bit more and then try something else. LR is my go-to processor.

I use RawTherapee exclusively (for at least 2+ years maybe 3) for processing my RAW files initially and then send to Paintshop Pro for further processing. RT integrates very nicely with PSP. Like any processing software: time, patience, reading the on line user manual, and experimentation you become accustom to what it can do. It DOES NOT do layers and selections etc etc > PSP does that.

YMMV
Willie

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

jerryc41 wrote:

I started trying out RawTherapee, but I'm not thrilled with it. It's not at all intuitive. I like to look at processing alternatives, and the price was right.

I'll play around with it a bit more and then try something else. LR is my go-to processor.

I was never thrilled with RawTherapee so I switched to darktable early on. But...like others have said, both RawTherapee and darktable were not designed with end user comfort in mind for sure. I can't speak much about RawTherapee, but darktable was designed to give the user very granular control over every possible bit of data. So with that kind of control, you could imagine the UI isn't going to be the flagship feature of the program. If you are comfortable with Lightroom and you really have no reason to change, I wouldn't personally.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

fjrwillie wrote:

...time, patience, reading the on line user manual...

Three negatives.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

PSP looks good. I takes up 1.79GB on my drive. The Parallels Toolbox (60MB) consists of thirty-one "tools" for working with the computer - finding duplicates, screen capture, recording audio, etc. It cost $20/year, and I doubt I'll renew after my first free year.

https://www.parallels.com/products/toolbox/

Larry Powell Loc: Columbus OH

Do you think LR hads anything over Photoshop Elements?

gtemple1 Loc: E. Olympia, WA

Jerry,
Full circle magazine has a How-to tutorial. https://fullcirclemagazine.org/ A couple of pages a month. Also, if you want a 500+ page PDF go to https://rawtherapee.com bottom of the page. Both are free!

captainbinary

I don't rent my lawnmower, so I certainly don't want to rent my photo-editor. I think I would try DT again, if only it had a print engine. I'm using On1 PR2020 at the moment, but find it sluggish in comparison with LR and the noise reduction algorithm lets it down badly. I also find the lens correction is way off, so I end up tweaking the manual sliders. LR is always spot on for geometric and colour aberration correction.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

captainbinary wrote:

I don't rent my lawnmower, so I certainly don't want to rent my photo-editor. I think I would try DT again, if only it had a print engine. I'm using On1 PR2020 at the moment, but find it sluggish in comparison with LR and the noise reduction algorithm lets it down badly. I also find the lens correction is way off, so I end up tweaking the manual sliders. LR is always spot on for geometric and colour aberration correction.

Darktable uses CUPS in it's print module which is not compatible with Windows, and might not be compatible with MacOS. If you aren't using darktable on linux you would have to probably print through GIMP after all processing.

There are some performance improvements and some other under the hood improvements coming next month with the DT 3.2 release.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Larry Powell wrote:

Do you think LR hads anything over Photoshop Elements?

They are two different tools for two different purposes and are not really comparable.

Lightroom is primarily a professional level file organizer and raw processor/converter. Photoshop Elements is pared down version of Photoshop.

The version of ACR Elements uses for raw processing is a subset of the full version of ACR available in Photoshop. It's a great program at a great price But with limited raw processing features.

Lightroom is a state of the art raw processor based on the full version of Adobe ACR with other features added. For those invested in raw shooting, it is much more advanced than the raw processing features available in Elements.

Once you get past the processing of raw files Elements has a significant number of features and tools not available in Lightroom, like layers as an example. Historically, many users of Lightroom have indicated they do 90% of their processing in that program and then transfer their images to the full version of Photoshop for final processing.