DEK Photography: The Accidental Kitty Model Shoot + RawTherapee Editor
Nice kitty, good kitty, pretty kitty! I thought these photos, which I took yesterday, would make for a nice test of the latest version of RawTherapee. If you're unfamiliar, this is one of the most advanced and feature rich photo (and in particular - RAW) editors, available for Linux.
Taken @ 105mm, f/8, 1/250s, ISO 100. Someone's got that mad look in their eyes.
As a person, who is quite familiar with Lightroom, RawTherappe is both great and horrible. On one side, it is extremely faster than the horribly optimized Adobe product. Then again, most Lightroom addicts scratch their heads, pondering "Why doesn't the sharpness slider do anything?".
Taken @ 105mm, f/8, 1/250s, ISO 100. Let's clean up before the photo shoot!
The truth is that the developers of RawTherapee wanted to create a fast editor. So they restricted the visibility of a number of modifiers to be available only at the 100% zoom level. That's less CPU intensive, but it's also less intuitive and user-friendly. I have to constantly switch between full screen and 100% zoom, to see how my image would look like, at the end. Could it be that having 24 megapixel RAW files is becoming an overkill for everyday photography?
Taken @ 105mm, f/8, 1/250s, ISO 100. Look at my fluffy belly!
Talking about modifiers, there are a lot of them, just as there used to be in previous versions. I could swear half of them apply similar effects and could easily be bundled together, simplifying the interface to something similar, already available in Lightroom. I've used RawTherapee in the past and I still keep getting lost among all the options.
Taken @ 105mm, f/8, 1/250s, ISO 100. Who's a playful kitty?
Cropping an image is yet another frustration. Instead of hiding the cropped out area, photographers constantly see a rectangle, outlining how the image will be processed as a .jpeg file, while the cropped out area is simply darker. This is extremely annoying, if you're used to cropping the image first and then fiddling with any further processing. Sometimes it feels like I'm working in a backwards direction.
Taken @ 105mm, f/8, 1/250s, ISO 100. Look, everything is upside down!
In the above image, I couldn't both recover the details on the cat's chin and keep the image properly exposed - I couldn't find a way to apply local adjustments to the image. Write up if you have an idea if this is possible!
But if I have to sum up this review, many of the annoying bugs have been sorted out (there used to be image flickering, with every modification made), the interface is much cleaner and all in all, saves me the occasional reboot into Windows, with Lightroom being the only reason I still keep this operating system. It would've been great if I could save the modifications to my RAW photos in an .xmp file, which Lightroom understands (or, alternatively, if Lightroom could open RawTherapee's .pp3 files).
Don't hesitate to ask any questions, if you have any!
Follow more of my work on #dek-photography (filter by "New")!
Check out some of my previous posts:
- DEK Macro Photography: The Cool Monster
- S7 Photography: One of the Loveliest Sculptures I've Seen
- DEK Photography: The Modern Hippie
- DEK Photography: Tower, Can We Haz Take Off?!
- Here's Why Bitcoin And Other Cryptos Have Soared
- Finally, vegans can wear plant clothes in winter!
- The Local Internet People
- DEK Photography: Alexander Pushkin
- More Flying Dessert Makers
- DEK Photography: It's a Bee
I love the cat photos. I have always been a "cat person."
Glad you like them - I like shooting street photography and although the lighting conditions are not always perfect, I enjoy capturing people and animals in as candid way as possible :)