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

(github.com)
211 points l8rlump | 3 comments | 09 Jul 25 02:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.449s | source
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strogonoff ◴[09 Jul 25 05:49 UTC] No.44506692[source]▶
The best raw image processing tool I know is called “RawTherapee”. It was developed by one or more absolute colour science geeks, it is CLI-scriptable, its companion RawPedia is a treasure trove of information (I learned many basics there, including how to create DCP profiles for calibration, dark frames, flat fields, etc.), and not to make a dig (fine, to make a bit of a dig) you can see the expertise starting with how it capitalizes “raw” in its name (which is, of course, not at all an acronym, though like with “WASM” it is a common mistake).

Beware though that it tends to not abstract away a lot of technicalities, if you dig deep enough you may encounter exotic terms like “illuminant”, “demosaicing method”, “green equilibration”, “CAM16”, “PU”, “nit” and so on, but I personally love it for that even while I am still learning what half of it all means.

I’d say the only major lacking feature of RT is support for HDR output, which hopefully will be coming by way of PNG v3 and Rec. 2100 support.

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babuloseo ◴[09 Jul 25 06:11 UTC] No.44506783[source]▶
I like this one its simple and easy to use
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strogonoff ◴[09 Jul 25 06:54 UTC] No.44507013[source]▶
May I ask why choose to shoot raw given simplicity and ease of use are priorities?
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Sharlin ◴[09 Jul 25 07:14 UTC] No.44507116[source]▶
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.
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strogonoff ◴[09 Jul 25 07:25 UTC] No.44507175[source]▶
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.

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1. knorker ◴[09 Jul 25 07:47 UTC] No.44507299[source]▶
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")

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2. strogonoff ◴[09 Jul 25 07:54 UTC] No.44507335[source]▶
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.

3. GrayShade ◴[09 Jul 25 08:33 UTC] No.44507589[source]▶
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.