Two alternative versions of Joeun’s portrait

I showed you that portrait photo of a young woman already which I took in front of the British Museum. And I’ve made that one with my usual workflow which was/is to first convert the raw .orf file with Olympus Viewer 3 in Windows, and then to tag and add Exif data and other small adjustments with RawTherapee on Linux. All well and good, practised and tested on thousands of my images.

But with new software versions come new tests, and so I found that by now, and for me, Darktable also has its merits. It’s especially great for rotating, adding frames, and even adding GPS data with simply dropping the photos onto an OpenStreetMap.

I also wanted to see the photo in black & white.

So after another conversion from .orf to .tif, this time with the newer Olympus Workspace (the successor of the former Olympus Viewer 3), I first loaded the resulting .tif into Silver Efex Pro 2 – and decided that for a portrait of a young woman the standard conversion method might be the best option. I then did the same with Olympus Workspace (same as if it would have been done in-camera) to compare both outputs.

And they were pretty much the same, really. Same file sizes, no real differences between these two. So I took the one made with Olympus Workspace (again, same as in-camera), and used RawTherapee 5.5 with my stored midtone procedure which shifts the midtones (not the blacks or the whites) from a neutral grey to a more brownish tone (which I „stole“ from a photo of a horse by Laura Wilson Cunningham (Owen Wilson’s mum who is a really great photographer)). Then I straightened the picture about -4.25 degrees and added 3.5% of a border (using one of the colour tones from within the image) with Darktable 2.6.0 – all on my Debian 10 “Buster” operating system which is out since Saturday, July 6th, 2019.

For a colour version, the process was more or less the same, minus the black and white conversion in Olympus Workspace, and minus the midtoning with RawTherapee of course. But the straightening, framing, and adding of GPS data was more or less the same.

Then I uploaded both versions to Flickr so that I can show them here without using too much space on our own server, and added them to some folders and groups in Flickr. And here they are:

7e3_7101262bw-rt-joeun-lee-ow-rt-dt
Portrait of Joeun Lee, London 2019

and the colour version:

7e3_7101262-joeun-lee-ow-dt
Portrait of Joeun Lee, London 2019

I like them both. Even without the framing, the aditional controls for rotating, or that GPS data functionality are very nice features to have. Other things are a bit more complicated in Darktable when compared to RawTherapee, but then again I’m just doing my first baby-steps here with this program after ignoring it for a long time…

Anyway, it’s nice to have some great tools, and it’s even nicer when they’re free.

And again and like always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.