Today I read the RawTherapee manual again, and decided to give the described workflow another try (see Q & A in their manual). For those who don’t know, RawTherapee is a free and now also open source (GPL) RAW image converter for Linux and also for Windows.
It’s really nice. And since all the steps you do until the final conversion into a jpg file are done in 16 bit, you are not losing any detail. You *could* even avoid that last 8 bit conversion, and save the result as a 16 bit TIFF file - but even print shops mostly expect 8 bit jpgs today, so it’s pretty pointless IMHO.
An example:
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| From selfmade |
I took this shot using a tripod, and my Olympus E-520 with the 40-150mm kit zoom at an EFL of about 200mm today. Since I worked with the raw file, I only applied a standard USM (unsharp mask) to the image - all white balance, color, and other things weren’t changed at all. No noise reduction. Saved as a 16 bit TIFF, and the final crop and conversion to 8 bit jpg were done using the Gimp. Since I still have the RAW .orf file from the camera, I threw away the TIFF afterwards.
I will definitely try this with more of my pictures from now on. Highly recommended.
Update, from short before midnight local time:
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| From selfmade |
Shot Snow White again, and this time with only the relatively dim lights from the dining room, and at an EFL of 300mm (150mm for 4/3rds cameras). Here I had to adjust the brightness of the picture a bit, and now everything including the conversion to 8 bit jpg (at 100%, so it’s about 1.2MB) was done using RawTherapee.
The more I use it, the more I like it.











