RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor

I like this one its simple and easy to use

May I ask why choose to shoot raw given simplicity and ease of use are priorities?

Those are certainly not mutually exclusive! The point of shooting raw is not to painstakingly tweak super-technical details, it’s to get processing latitude to make photos the way you want. Often that involves simple adjustment of shadows, highlights, saturation and so on, applied to a large number of photos in bulk.

There's no inherent usability issue with shooting RAW. My experience has been that none of the open source tools can hold a candle to the proprietary ones.

RawTherapee I uninstalled almost immediately because it crashed a few times and the UI didn't seem to jive with what I wanted to do.

Despite DarkTable's horrific interface and hostile developers I keep it around because I can often beat it into submission (but what a chore that is). And that's the thing. Even if I were shooting JPEGs DT's interface would still be a problem.

I fought darktable for two years before feeling right at home. I had used Lightroom since it's inception. I'm happy now I invested the time. I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.

The priorities are mutually exclusive: delegating scene data conversion to in-camera engine grants you the most simplicity and ease of use at the expense of control; the territory of technical details grants you the most ability to make the photos looks the way you want at the expense of simplicity. You dial one up, you dial the other down.

For example, your choice of demosaicing method can make a tangible difference in finer details: some methods would make them less noisy (better for some styles), others would better preserve finer details (better for other styles). Abstracting it behind one “more detail—less detail” slider isn’t going to work because “detail” can mean a multitude of things, of which sometimes you want one and not the other, and inventing new sliders with user-friendly but inscrutable labels a la “brilliance”, “texture”, and so on, can only get you so far.

There are shades between simplicity vs. control, of course, and so I am curious to know the answer from the horse’s mouth so to speak: to what end they choose to compromise simplicity.

It’s just “raw”, it’s not an acronym.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but in my hobby experience it's sometimes the difference between a photo being fine or even great, and being completely unusable.

If the white balance is set wrong in-camera, then the JPG just came out all blue. It's effectively a black and white photo (albeit in shades of blue), and there's nothing to be done about it. Shot in RAW, the photo can be made color again, extremely easily and quickly.

In fact it gets worse, not better, if you on the day try to adjust the white balance, as you go from outdoors to indoors. Not to mention if you change from flash and back. Auto is safer, but when it's wrong, the photo is unusable, and the moment is gone.

But my DSLR is now over a decade old. Maybe "auto" has gotten much better?

So yeah, for me the main thing is to be able to post facto adjust white balance, which JPG does not support. (if you've done it with both JPG and RAW, you know what I mean when I say "does not support")

Right, I suppose shooting raw is good because you need to think less about your settings at shooting time.

I will say that “auto” is pretty decent on the phones in most common lighting scenarios like sunlight/shade/outdoor/tungsten/fluorescent—white point is an entirely subjective thing that cannot be reliably determined automatically, so in my experience you rarely get the correct rendition of, say, bright pink clouds at sunset, or a book with pink pages (the phone would think it must be the some weird lighting that should be corrected for, because obviously a book can only have nearly white pages, right?), etc.—but due to physical limitations of sensor size and inferior optics the phone is worse than even a decade-old APS-C DSLR in most regards overall.

It's not about not "feeling right at home". I've detailed this in other comments but it's just that DT has an abysmal interface and that the devs insist that it needs to be complex. This sort of hostile attitude is part of what spawned Ansel.

  I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.

This is a bit of a myth.

One of my complaints dealt with how unintuitive the sliders are. There's no additional control gained by making the UI widgets difficult to deal with.

Another dealt with trying to set color temperature. There are two places color temperature can be set and they'll both conflict with each other. The newer module is absurdly complex. It's great if you're writing a dissertation on color rendition but less great if you're trying to be productive.

Sure there's more control offered by having ten different demosaicing algorithms to choose from. Unfortunately I can't think of a time when I've needed or wanted that control. Maybe if I shot Fuji or Sigma. But I don't. And most folks don't.

Presets and history are a nightmare. Items in the history widget get aggregated so it's difficult/impossible to pick out individual steps. If you give labels to the actions in a preset (my terminology is off because I've not used DT much in a while)… sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't and things don't appear to pick up the label/group/whatever it's called. If memory serves I had to apply presets in one module to have them visible in the develop module.

The vestigial DAM stuff… ugh.

There's no obvious A/B split views.

Perhaps the most obnoxious thing is that DT shamelessly apes the Lightroom interface but in reality behaves almost nothing like Lightroom. There's a TON of complexity for little-if-any improvement in outcomes.

First, let me concur that Darktable is not great. I found it to be neither quite as simple as Lightroom, nor as powerful as RawTherapee, and severely lacking in documentation.

> Another dealt with trying to set color temperature. There are two places color temperature can be set and they'll both conflict with each other.

There are at least three colour temperature / white balance controls in RT; more if you count output colour space primaries, Lab space curve, etc. as ways of creative white balance control.

I’m not sure I see any particular conflict between them. They all do different things; some of them are more relevant if you want to achieve the most precise representation (e.g., you are digitizing analog prints or paintings), others are more relevant if you are going for a creative look of your own.

It’s probably best to consult RawPedia[0], but as far as I understand:

— One of them controls raw data interpretation, and affects how different tools work down the line (e.g., highlight recovery or targeting sky with wavelets). As far as I understand, you probably want to keep this one technically correct and as close as possible to the true neutral white/grey point; at this step you are helping the tool do the rest of its job and not trying to achieve a look. If you use a colour card, a DCP profile, etc., then you know exactly what to set White Balance controls to.

— There are a couple of controls under CAM model, which you may or may not be using depending on your profile. With scene illuminant you set… well, scene illuminant (the light you have in your scene), and viewing conditions allow you to shift colours to make it look right if you know your photo will be viewed in an environment with particular light.

— Then, of course, you have dozens of different ways of creatively controlling perceived white balance via different curves or CLUT; I think these are most handy if you are going for a look.

[0] https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/White_Balance

It’s a case of diminishing returns. Shooting raw is a huge and obvious improvement if you want to post-process in almost any way. Conditional on that the workflow should be as smooth and simple as possible. Abstract controls like "clarity" are fine if the result of adjusting them is tangible and almost always does what you want. Giving the user lots of knobs that hardly have a visible effect (let alone a desired effect) is not an improvement.

Almost no professional photographer will care about the intricacies of the demosaicing algorithm, or the choice between a dozen different denoising modules, and Lightroom is entirely correct in not giving you a zillion knobs to adjust things that have no effect on image quality except in the rarest of cases. In 99% of cases the controls that matter are:

* Basic exposure/shadows/contrast etc

* Curves/levels for more control if needed

* White balance

* Cropping, obviously

* Cloning/healing brush

* Simple knobs for sharpening and NR

* Level/perspective adjustment

* Lens aberration correction (most of the time no manual input needed if the lens is in the batabase)

I try to daily drive Linux but can't find a simple / nice to use RAW editor. I had high hopes for Darktable but I was astonished how bad the GUI is. When trying to delete photo, it deletes the photo under the pointer, not the photo I selected... WTF ?!? And the whole app feels so complicated... Then there's forks emerging and the dev forces are diluted in multiples applications and Adobe continues to milk its users because Open Source dev can't work together. Between Shotwell, Gthumb, Loupe, RT, DigiKam, and more... Imagine if all this efforts was done in one cohesive app ? Ok I stop dreaming.

> Shooting raw is a huhe and obvious improvement if you want to post-process in almost any way.

See, you are saying “want to post-process”, which to me says that there is a different priority present rather than just “simplicity and ease of use”.

If the priority is “making the photos look the way you want them to look”, then we are in a territory where it is not as simple as “this tool is easy to use and therefore a better choice than that tool”.

I do think auto white balance is a little better these days. My old DSLR often had a strong magenta tint magenta in scenes with a lot of green (like forests). My new mirrorless camera from the same manufacturer no longer does that.

If you seek a GUI for managing/cataloguing photos, my advice would be to look for that and not a raw image processing tool that incidentally happens to also handle cataloguing (inevitably in a half-baked way).

I have never seen Lightroom (or C1, for that matter) as compelling at all ever since I started using RawTherapee. Unlike, say, InDesign, which is legitimately a difficult to replace professional tool with incredible capabilities, Adobe’s raw image processing offering looks incredibly dumbed down.

I have the same approach. I really like "easy to use, hard to master" tools in general.

If you look at CaptureOne you can see how easy it is to edit a raw image. Most of the time it looks like the camera jpeg without having to tune anything. But then you have the options to go in depth.

Sometimes I have a photo session where everything is to my liking, just a bit of exposure and crop. Other times I shoot in night clubs with no flash and I have multiple layers of masks for a single photo.

A UI with decent defaults goes a long way into making a complex app easy to use.

It's not binary.

You can want post-processing, but also don't want to spend 50 hours to learn a tool. Sometimes you just want "make it look close to the in camera jpeg, but let me adjust to exposure"

It's not that complex.

Yes good point. But my needs are very limited. On macOS I use the Photo app to cull, make small adjustments, and crop. On Windows there is also a Photo app that allows such basic features. They both works with RAW and works fine with my NAS mount in smb to cull directly the files (though macOS is a pain for that, doesn't play well with files, need to import in lib).

On linux, the default Gnome image viewer is nice but you can't make adjustement and when deleting a file, the file is not remove from the NAS directory (need a manual refresh). With Gthumb it works for deleting files but the crop tool and the overall app is not as nice. Anyway I'll continue to look for my perfect app or for the default Gnome viewer to update its features (I think it is in active development)

> I’m not sure I see any particular conflict between them.

I don't have DT under hand to check, but there are two controls which, if active at the same time, will produce a warning along the lines of "wb is already set in [the other control]".

edit: I think [0] describes the issue

[0] https://discuss.pixls.us/t/white-balance-applied-twice/34949

This tracks with my RawTherapee experience. I copy in base settings corresponding to the camera and the lens and then make tweaks. After a while often one of the pre-made profiles is good enough.

It’s not binary is the point and the whole reason I asked the original commenter why put premium into simplicity and ease and then immediately violate that by shooting raw.

I see, that explains why DT is confusing in this regard.

Do you understand him now?

  my advice would be to look for that and not a raw image processing tool
  that incidentally happens to also handle cataloguing (inevitably in a
  half-baked way).

Eh. No? Lightroom is a pretty darn good DAM. Maybe digiKam is at least as good, but I wouldn't know as it crashed the first time I launched it. I want to use my tools, not debug them. DT's asset management is, to put it charitably, an after thought.

About the worst thing I can say about Lightroom is that it didn't reliably work with my iPhone. Otherwise it did everything I needed in terms of tagging, presets, and organizing the pictures on the file system.

Meanwhile darktable creates freaking sidecars for every picture while it relies on an SQLite database for tracking history just like Lightroom does.

  I have never seen Lightroom (or C1, for that matter) as compelling at all ever since
  I started using RawTherapee. 

Conversely Darktable is the best advert I've seen for Lighgtroom.

The problems I listed were for Darktable. If you use the stock configuration and go into the "white balance" module you will get an error. If memory serves turning off the "white balance" module also leads to problems. Instead you're expected to go into the "color calibration" module. More powerful? Perhaps. Unnecessarily obtuse? Absolutely.

I tried Rawtherapee first as they actually sign their (macOS) app. Unfortunately it was too unstable to be useful.

Filmulator (I really need to fix the CI...)

> The priorities are mutually exclusive: delegating scene data conversion to in-camera engine grants you the most simplicity and ease of use at the expense of control; the territory of technical details grants you the most ability to make the photos looks the way you want at the expense of simplicity.

The camera makes all those decisions even when shooting raw -- and there are stored in the raw file. So, by default, processing a raw file witout doing any tweaks will get you the jpeg you would have gotten.

My camera (Nikon) -- and I assume the others -- will even store both the RAW and the JPEG, so you don't even have to go through the automatic conversion step if you don't want to.

I windows I highly recommend IrfanView just for basic photo viewing (odd name). It's extremely fast.

For example — Adobe\CameraRaw Sony SLT-A65 Adobe Standard.dcp ?

    DCP Tone curve
    DCP Base table
    DCP Look table