Slider Shock or What Do I Do Now

You have  RT on the screen in front of you. You have read the first pages of the manual and now have the file browsers loaded with a directory full of images. You have selected your first RAW file. You are ready to fix problems.  Your snapshot will become a sent-to-all-the-grandmas minor masterpiece.

Then it hits you. Big Time.  Slider Shock!!. You think "Never Never in a Zillion years will I Learn how to use All those Sliders and Check Boxes."!! You mutter "I want my money back"! Then you remember RawTherapee is free.

Happen to everyone. Even me. And back then there were a bunch less sliders. But by now I've discovered the big RT secret.  Learning how to use all the sliders is for hang-on-the-wall-and-be-awarded-the-ribbon masterpieces. For the send-to-grandma ones you only use a few sliders. As for the rest--I must confess it wasn't until my last post that I needed to know much of anything about what was going on inside the RAW section. You can pick up most things as you go along.

This is a common exposure problem. Too light outside the window. Too dark inside the kitchen, The only thing correctly exposed  is the flowers on the window sill.  

The send-to-grandma workflow in seven easy steps:

Exposure compensation to 1.00.  This lightens Charlotte-the grandma interesting subject--but blows out the outside  foliage.

Enable HighLight Reconstruction. Because we are working with sky peaking through foliage I used the blend mode. The highlight recovery sliders-out of the picture- are at their default settings.

Now we are dealing with what I am beginning to think of as the twin power tools of RT. The four entries in  the history box appears when you set up Tone Mapping and CIECAM02 to work together. Just follow the steps in the Tone Mapping tool tip.

I used the control cage version of the Brightness curve and dragged it up until the snap was brighter than I wanted.

I fine tuned the snap with the Brightness and Colorfulness sliders. This shows the setting I decided to go with.

Rather than loading the snap into the queue. I copied my new procedure to the clipboard.

Finally I went back to the file browser, selected raw files with similar exposure problems, pasted my procedure and sent them all to the queue to be turned into grandma happy jpgs ready to be printed or emailed.

A couple of the jpgs that came out of the queue.

Not hard at all,  If you want to do additional work --a crop for instance--load up the raw files again. They will come up in 'last saved' mode ready to be worked on.

RAW Therapee's Batch Processing to the Rescue

Autumn, a long time flickr contact, had a problem. During a vacation trip to Florida two years ago she went sailing and took a pile of photos with her Coolpic 550s P&S. Unfortunately her camera was accidentally setup with an EV of -1.7 and all her jpg pics came out ~4X underexposed.

Batch processing is not a new RT feature but until recently I hadn't realized how powerful and useful it could be.  I've taken my share of images with a setting wrong--white balance, exposure, etc--before I noticed and corrected it. So here is a mini tutorial using some of Autumn's photos on how I would use RT to hide these mistakes.

Start RT in its normal multi-tab mode and open the folder with the underexposed photos. Start by upping the exposure  +1.7 in one of the photo using the Exp Comp slider. Name and save your new profile.

Go into the file browser and control click on the other underexposed images.

Right click on the selected photos. This will bring up the new batch interface. Click on Profile Operations, Apply Profile, and in this case Autumn Underexposed, the name of profile I just saved.  Your copy of RT has a profile folder that holds all the default profiles that come with RT plus any you created and saved.

After a few seconds the thumbnails will brighten up. What have you done? Like Adobe Lightroom you haven't changed any of your photos. Instead you have created a pp3 file for the photos you selected which tells RT what changes you want to make.

What's next? If exposure correction was all you wanted to do, you could hit ctrl Q to put them into the Batch Queue. After selected what folder you want to save them to and the desired file format--jpg, 8 and 16 bit Tiff or PNG--you can hit start processing and let RT do its thing.

I preferred to fine tune the three photos I was working with.

The horizon was tilted, always happens with rocking boat photos, so I corrected that with the straighting tool  The overall photo was now exposed correctly but Autumn and her sister Jordan--wild hair--were still too dark. I used the LAB mode luminous channel on the Exposure tab to create a tone curve. I could have done this with the more common RGB mode but I think the LAB mode is cleaner since it doesn't introduce color shifts. Beside LAB mode editing on a RAW file is one of many features unique to RT. I also noticed that parts of the T-shirt were blown out so I use the Highlight Recovery slider to correct that problem.

After I finished editing the photos I put them into the batch queue.  There are two versions of the air plane image, each with different editing. Once I convert them I'll view them full size and decide which one I prefer. It's a great timesaving feature and a few days ago I converted the same photo 14 ways in one operation to check out the new profiles that showed up in the latest build of RT.

Although it wasn't necessary since I have 4GB of memory on this computer. I also closed everything but the batch queue and file browser.  If you look close, I forgot to circle it, you can see where the memory usage dropped in the Windows Task Master window.  RT can do many great things very well but that requires more RAM memory than the less useful free (and expensive commercial) editors. So if you have an older computer watch your memory usages.

How many great things can RT do very well? Here is the current list

If you click on Apply Profile (partial) you can pick what features you want to use from your saved profile. It is also a great overview of what RT can do

Finally I must thank Autumn for letting me use her photos in this tutorial.  You can find her flickr photostream at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/syksylla/