A brief and abortive foray into other raw processors

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I originally scanned with a tripod and it took awhile to square everything up and it required scanning in the dark. This setup solves all of those problems and takes about a minute to setup. I designed and printed it.

Awesome. I have a camera scanning adapter that screws into the front of the macro lens and holds the film perfectly parallel. It works well, but is kind of fiddly to set up. Your design looks like it would be a lot easier and faster to use!

 

[Cascadilla]

you don't have to install the updates if you don't want them. You can set it so that you have to manually install the updates, and when a new one comes out it tells you its available and what it gives you.

I haven't allowed auto updates for a long time from Adobe or anyone else--I got tired of being an unpaid beta tester and having software crash when I was working against a tight deadline.

 

[boojum]

I can sympathize with photographers who are doing this as a hobby and want to minimize continuing expense for a product that they need but would prefer to buy once and not continue to pay for for the indefinite future. As a working pro my subscription to Photoshop is a small regular expense compared to studio rent, insurance, utilities, etc., all of which I have to have. Where I have issues with Adobe is the continuing bloating of the software and the addition of features that I don't really need or want and the resulting bugs from frequent upgrades. My studio computer is a 9 year old 27" iMac that I loaded up when I bought it with as much RAM was it would hold along with the fastest graphics card, etc. Since I can't upgrade my operating system without losing some other software that I use the last couple of upgrades to Photoshop don't apply to me since my computer won't work with them. I'm semi retired at this point, so I'm reluctant to pour a lot of money into a new computer, especially since my ancient iMac continues to perform well. If Adobe jacks up the price substantially it might be time for me to look into Affinity Photo or something else. When I was buying Photoshop outright I only bought every other update since it was rare that there was a new feature in each update that was that compelling. Finally, each of us has to make decisions for ourselves about where our finite supply of money goes. People get into photography for lots of reasons--some are equipment collectors, some are avid picture takers, some do it for a living and many of us, I suspect, are some combination of all three of those categories. So opinions will vary and what is valid for me in my circumstances may not be valid for anyone else.

What you say in differentiating between pro's and amateurs is a good point. And some amateurs thrive on post edits while others do not. Here as in many places one size does not fit all. The petulant assertion that it does is invalid. Just look at all the flavors on this board, from seasoned pro do brand new tyro. And that is part of the charm of the board. There is room on this lifeboat for all of us.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

In @Chriscrawfordphoto defense, I do think he has a point. It's kind of nutty to have five figures worth of equipment, travel all over the place to take pix, and then grump about $120 a year for editing.

Most of the people I see online throwing the biggest tantrums about Adobe are men who own $20,000+ worth of camera gear

OP is not like this, as far as I know.

But to be honest I don't really want to know that is the equipment worth of anyone here or else online. Not my business.

And it is not my business to tell how people have to spend their wealth.
The only thing I know is what wealth and spending are same thing, where 120 per year does count.

 

[DownUnder]

Ko.fe in his previous post hits nail squarely on the head.

We have now drifted (at least laterally, which is one positive about all this huffle and guff) from PP software to scanners. With as usual, a lot of useful information from posters, with an occasional insult thrown in to keep the pot stirred and the stove set on hot.

Please could we now get off this Mine Is Better/Bigger Than Yours argument and move on to better things? Scanners are okay to talk about, after all they make use of software, and I hope that this new talk of scans, scanners, scanning won't open yet another furnace door of disagreement and invective. We are here after all to learn and help one another after all. Not score verbal points off.

Okay, so some (rich old men, as someone in this thread huffed) lavish their cash on $20,000 scanners. Others make do with lesser gear. A fair few use their cameras and home-brewed setups. Good on it all, whatever floats your boat. A touchy matter, this, given the branding we've been given as old duffers with loaded pockets (I wish mine were!).

For the same reasons as I've resisted buying into Lightroom and Photoshop, I make do with gear I bought when I was employed and could afford to buy. My Plustek 7600i has given consistently good service since 2010. For a year it developed a visible 'band', which then went away and the unit has scanned faultlessly since. I did access online data and took the thing apart (very carefully) and cleaned it out of years of house dust, which may have helped.

I also did a lot of online reading and research before I set to scanning a few tens of thousands negatives and slides, which totally put me off scanning for what remains of my life. I did this mostly during the Covid lockdown in AUS, when like so many I was mostly stuck at home and had to find things to do to pass the time without daily raids in the liquor cabinet (this is no joke, many of my friends succumbed and now have health issues as a result).

I can be a slow learner with complex things, so initially I made many test scans, up to 4-5-6 or at times more scans of the same image. Eventually my skills improved and I got entirely satisfactory scans with one or at most two efforts. My biggest bugbear was sharpening - with older slides I found I had to auto sharpen, which often meant too sharp edges on my scans. Colors were also a problem and I had to tinker a lot with settings.

I have an archive of 25,000 6x6 and 6x9 negatives and slides from the 1970s and 1980s, mostly from Asia in the '70s, so historically quite valuable - even a half century ago I was photographing colonial architecture and publishers are now keen on my images of now long-vanished pre-independence buildings.

So a MF scanner was needed. I couldn't afford a Plustek 120, which has an unenviable reputation as an expensive flop. So after shopping around I got an end of stock discounted Epson V600. Again the learning curve took time and effort, tinkering with settings, doing several scans of many images and comparing. Lots of fun at first, eminently boring after the first week or two weeks.

Post Covid my stock photo sales have picked up a little. This year a fair few of my film scan images have sold to publishers. So a win-win for me. Obviously, I could have done better by investing more dosh in better scanners and software, but I'm not Richie Rich and as in all else in my life I have to make do with what I could afford.

I do my post processing on a 10 year old Acer laptop with extra RAM but otherwise not other fine-tuning - it has Windows 8.1 which as my IT-minded friends jokingly say is akin to driving a 1960s Brabant. I've turned off the internet, not that I'm paranoid about spies and data snatching, but as this Acer is now only a post processing work box and to write an occasional chapter to one of the novels I'm trying to finish.

All this to me is the simplest (and important to me, the most affordable) setup for my needs. Being me I'm happy with all this antiquity, and that's what matters most. In most ways my gear matches the user.

My final thought - the OP sure knew what he was talking about when he wrote "abortive" in his heading...

As for the OP, Chris has been generous with sharing some useful information to us in the past. He is also, in my view, an exceptionally gifted photographer. And he loves cats. All fine qualities. I for one can now easily forget a few small lapses in posting etiquette.

My two cents in all this. I'm enjoying this thread. Please keep posting. Even fighting, if we must. The new year is fast approaching and all this keeps me from dying of boredom or hitting the aforesaid grog shelf.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Next year marks 50 years that I've been writing code. I like doing it, as many people on this forum know. I've used some premium software development tools, have paid for upgrades, and maintenance/support packages on a yearly basis. What I have never done is relied on software that is leased. A decision made a long time ago. The difference: when the maintenance/support package is discontinued, the current version and state of the software is locked in. You have use of it. With leased software, you do not. Adobe went with the latter model: lease, not buy. They lost me as a customer at that point, no more paying for updates, so lock in at the current rev-level. There are alternatives to Lightroom and Photoshop, I started using them with the Nikon Z5. I found them good, and could be made better. The software is open source, and uses standard file formats for profiles.

No whining, no stamping feet, just a practice that I have followed for 50 years now. I'm not changing now.

 

[wlewisiii]

Next year marks 50 years that I've been writing code. I like doing it, as many people on this forum know. I've used some premium software development tools, have paid for upgrades, and maintenance/support packages on a yearly basis. What I have never done is relied on software that is leased. A decision made a long time ago. The difference: when the maintenance/support package is discontinued, the current version and state of the software is locked in. You have use of it. With leased software, you do not. Adobe went with the latter model: lease, not buy. They lost me as a customer at that point, no more paying for updates, so lock in at the current rev-level. There are alternatives to Lightroom and Photoshop, I started using them with the Nikon Z5. I found them good, and could be made better. The software is open source, and uses standard file formats for profiles.

No whining, no stamping feet, just a practice that I have followed for 50 years now. I'm not changing now.

For me there is also the matter of my preference of using a Unix or Unix-style operating system like I have been preferring since the mid 80's. That is currently Mint Linux though I have no particular loyalty to it. It does however mean that I have to either use FOSS solutions or emulation. I have found the FOSS solutions quite suitable for my needs at this time and I can duplicate my desktop system on my laptop easily.

Adobe, Capture One, MS and the rest do not allow for that.

 

[chuckroast]

There is NO FREE SOFTWARE that is anywhere near as good as Lightroom for RAW processing. None. I have tried most of the free and cheap alternatives and every one of them, with one exception, produced inferior image quality.

The one good one was Skylum Luminar, which I'll talk about more in a moment. The rest produced poor color rendering (Except Capture one, whose color rendering is wonderful), and poor fine detail resolution compared to Lightroom.

I wanted to follow up on this, if I might Chris. I am trying to understand the mechanism by which one piece of software would have better- or worse color than another on a given monitor. The RAW file is - more-or-less just a set of bits describing what the sensor saw. The color space and rendering is established by the monitor's gamut (or printer's if that's in play).

So, are you saying that the free software you've used is deficient because:

1. It is incorrectly reading the RAW file (which presumably has a published standard).
2. It's is reading the file correctly but not properly mapping the results to color.
3. It's setup with the wrong defaults
4. It's too limited in features compared to what you prefer

I ask this because I am having trouble understanding the mechanism of failure here. The entire signal chain is digital in this situation. There should be no loss of fidelity from capture to rendering (assuming calibrated devices), unless the software is buggy or misimplemented.

In my direct observation, for example, Darktable gives me very predictable color from RAW files. However, I stipulate that I am a 99% monochrome film shooter and you may well be able to see nuances of color variation to which I am blind.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I wanted to follow up on this, if I might Chris. I am trying to understand the mechanism by which one piece of software would have better- or worse color than another on a given monitor. The RAW file is - more-or-less just a set of bits describing what the sensor saw. The color space and rendering is established by the monitor's gamut (or printer's if that's in play).

So, are you saying that the free software you've used is deficient because:

1. It is incorrectly reading the RAW file (which presumably has a published standard).
2. It's is reading the file correctly but not properly mapping the results to color.
3. It's setup with the wrong defaults
4. It's too limited in features compared to what you prefer

I ask this because I am having trouble understanding the mechanism of failure here. The entire signal chain is digital in this situation. There should be no loss of fidelity from capture to rendering (assuming calibrated devices), unless the software is buggy or misimplemented.

In my direct observation, for example, Darktable gives me very predictable color from RAW files. However, I stipulate that I am a 99% monochrome film shooter and you may well be able to see nuances of color variation to which I am blind.

The raw data is not the final colors. It just says how much light each pixel on the sensor read. The pixels in a finished digital image are actually constructed by the software by combining four adjacent sensor pixels: two green pixels, one red, and one blue. Because the exact color of the red, blue and green primaries each camera maker chooses are not the same, and because it has to combine data from four pixels, the software has to interpret the final color. You can actually see this in Lightroom by choosing from the different rendering standards that Adobe offers (Adobe Color, Adobe Portrait, Adobe Landscape, Adobe Standard, and Adobe Vivid). In addition, you can create your own rendering standard and you can buy plugins for Lightroom that add those created by the plugin makers! Every RAW processing software has its own rendering standard and most of them offer several choices just like Adobe does in Lightroom.

If you shoot JPEG instead of RAW, the camera's built in software does the raw conversion according to the camera maker's standard (and most cameras offer choices of rendering standards for JPEGs, too!). It'll look different than what you'll get from third-party RAW converters like Adobe or DXO, or whatever.

To confuse things even further, the color temperature numbers in different RAW processors give different results! You can enter a certain color temperature and green/magenta compensation number in each program with the same image file and get different color.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

ART. Darktable, and Raw Therapee- Share Notes Open-Source Image Processing Software.

I installed "ART", Another Raw Therapee" fork on my HP Tower yesterday. I bought a Nikon Z5 this week, and needed new software to process the .NEF files from the Z5. As Adobe no longer sells Stand-Alone licenses for Lightroom, I am done with them. I've used Adobe Photoshop for 30 years, starting...

rangefinderforum.com

Example using LR4.4 and ART using LR6 .DCP profile for my Nikon Df.

Working with Digital cameras, ART and Lightroom produce near identical results when used with the same DCP file. These are part of the DNG specification. The DCP files contains the parameters that the raw processor used to convert the DNG file into an RGB (or greyscale) image.

ART and Raw Therapee both use the same DCP files used in Lightroom. Darktable does not.

 

[chuckroast]

The raw data is not the final colors. It just says how much light each pixel on the sensor read. The pixels in a finished digital image are actually constructed by the software by combining four adjacent sensor pixels: two green pixels, one red, and one blue. Because the exact color of the red, blue and green primaries each camera maker chooses are not the same, and because it has to combine data from four pixels, the software has to interpret the final color. You can actually see this in Lightroom by choosing from the different rendering standards that Adobe offers (Adobe Color, Adobe Portrait, Adobe Landscape, Adobe Standard, and Adobe Vivid). In addition, you can create your own rendering standard and you can buy plugins for Lightroom that add those created by the plugin makers! Every RAW processing software has its own rendering standard and most of them offer several choices just like Adobe does in Lightroom.

If you shoot JPEG instead of RAW, the camera's built in software does the raw conversion according to the camera maker's standard (and most cameras offer choices of rendering standards for JPEGs, too!). It'll look different than what you'll get from third-party RAW converters like Adobe or DXO, or whatever.

To confuse things even further, the color temperature numbers in different RAW processors give different results! You can enter a certain color temperature and green/magenta compensation number in each program with the same image file and get different color.

So if I understand correctly, you're saying that no open source raw processor you've tried gets that color interpolation right, is that correct?

I'm not being argumentative, but curious. Now I may need to rent Lightroom for a month to see for myself.

I do have a use case from time-to-time where I have to cope with mixed color light - incandescent + flash + ambient - which is maddening to try and correct. I wonder if LR could this this better ...

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Leica M240, with 267xxxx CZJ Sonnar "T" 5cm F1.5. Wide-Open. I converted this lens to Leica Mount using a J-3.

ART using M240 DCP profile from LR6.


Lightroom 4.4 using M240 DCP file from LR6.



In ART, you can specify the DCP file to load from your computer.
It is under the COLOR Tab (ALT-C), scroll down to "Color Management", and select "Custom" to browse the computer. OR- use my trick to match DCP filename to the camera name used by the software. The camera name is embedded in the RAW file.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

So if I understand correctly, you're saying that no open source raw processor you've tried gets that color interpolation right, is that correct?

I'm not being argumentative, but curious. Now I may need to rent Lightroom for a month to see for myself.

I do have a use case from time-to-time where I have to cope with mixed color light - incandescent + flash + ambient - which is maddening to try and correct. I wonder if LR could this this better ...

I like the way Lightroom interprets the color better. I don't know if it is more accurate but it does look nicer. If you want, I'll do a comparison and post the results.

As for mixed light, that is hard no matter what, and I don't think Adobe would cope with that better than what you're using. It is basically impossible to get good color in mixed light, so anything you do must by necessity be a compromise. There will be some parts of the photo that look ok, some that look bad, and nothing will look perfect. You just adjust the white balance sliders till you get something that looks reasonably pleasing and settle for that.

The photo below is one I recently found. I shot this when my son was seven years old. Twenty years ago! The restaurant had warm lights, probably incandescents back then; but there were large windows letting in cool daylight on one side.Some of it looks too warm, some too cool, but this looked better than correcting for the interior light only or the window light only. A compromise; it looks ok, but not perfect. It was a RAW file from a Nikon D70. My first digital camera. I edited it in the current version of Lightroom.

 

[chuckroast]

I like the way Lightroom interprets the color better. I don't know if it is more accurate but it does look nicer. If you want, I'll do a comparison and post the results.

As for mixed light, that is hard no matter what, and I don't think Adobe would cope with that better than what you're using. It is basically impossible to get good color in mixed light, so anything you do must by necessity be a compromise. There will be some parts of the photo that look ok, some that look bad, and nothing will look perfect. You just adjust the white balance sliders till you get something that looks reasonably pleasing and settle for that.

The photo below is one I recently found. I shot this when my son was seven years old. Twenty years ago! The restaurant had warm lights, probably incandescents back then; but there were large windows letting in cool daylight on one side.Some of it looks too warm, some too cool, but this looked better than correcting for the interior light only or the window light only. A compromise; it looks ok, but not perfect. It was a RAW file from a Nikon D70. My first digital camera. I edited it in the current version of Lightroom.

Yes, as time permits, I'd like to see a comparison of a full gamut color image processed in LR vs, RawTherapee if possible.

I certainly get that we tend to gravitate to the tools we know best and thus "see" well with. I am somewhat less convinced that there is a huge and objective difference between these tools if both are used to their "edges".

That said, if I were doing serious color (heaven forbid 😉 and I was doing so as a matter of commercial intent (oh, the horrors!), I would almost certainly be using an LR/PS workflow. It's the commercial standard. Moreover, at least among the open source tooling I know well, none of them support 16 bit color, at least last I looked. And OBVIOUSLY, if I were forced to do commercial work, it would be with a 60 Mpix Leica D11 or 100 Mpix Hasselblad back on my V body ... duh .... 😉

(I still might rent me some LR soon, just for fun. I just have to figure out how: A) It will work with Linux and B) I can keep the images local, as alleged upthread.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Moreover, at least among the open source tooling I know well, none of them support 16 bit color, at least last I looked.

ART supports the 16-bit Linear DNG files that I generate using my Leica M Monochrom. I take in the 14-bit DNG and convert each pixel to 16-Bits using a Gamma Curve, and then create a new file specifying 16-bit pixels. Works fine. I also wrote a version that works with the M9 and M8 to convert to 16-bit pixels with a Gamma curve.

Art also has 16-bit export file formats. I just grabbed this.

 

[chuckroast]

ART supports the 16-bit Linear DNG files that I generate using my Leica M Monochrom. I take in the 14-bit DNG and convert each pixel to 16-Bits using a Gamma Curve, and then create a new file specifying 16-bit pixels. Works fine. I also wrote a version that works with the M9 and M8 to convert to 16-bit pixels with a Gamma curve.

Art also has 16-bit export file formats. I just grabbed this.
View attachment 4852488

That's great to know. Do you happen to have a pointer to the home page for ART?

 

[Sonnar Brian]

That's great to know. Do you happen to have a pointer to the home page for ART?

ART (Another RAW Therapee)

ART (Another RAW Therapee), free download for Windows. Advanced image manipulation with RAW and other formats for the discerning photographer.

another-raw-therapee-art.en.lo4d.com

I got it from this link ^

Also has a forum-

ART

Welcome to the users forum of <a href="https://art.pixls.us">ART</a>, a free, open-source, cross-platform raw image processing program. ART is a derivative of the popular <a href="http://rawtherapee.com">RawTherapee</a>, trading a bit of customization and control over various processing...

discuss.pixls.us

Edit- and seems to have moved here:

Home

A newer version of ART was released in September 2024. I just installed it, and copied the ".DCP" files to the "C:\ART\1.21.3\dcpprofiles" directory of my installation.
LR4.4 and LR6 use the same file format as ART and RT. You may copy the files from Lightroom to them, note the exact name used for the camera in ART and RT must be the same as the filename.

"Leica Camera AG M9 Digital Camera" used for the name in ART corresponds to "Leica Camera AG M9 Digital Camera.DCP" in the folder.

I also have a thread on my forum to share tips and expeirence.

ART. Darktable, and Raw Therapee- Share Notes Open-Source Image Processing Software.

I installed "ART", Another Raw Therapee" fork on my HP Tower yesterday. I bought a Nikon Z5 this week, and needed new software to process the .NEF files from the Z5. As Adobe no longer sells Stand-Alone licenses for Lightroom, I am done with them. I've used Adobe Photoshop for 30 years, starting...

rangefinderforum.com

 

[wlewisiii]

That's great to know. Do you happen to have a pointer to the home page for ART?

This is where I preferred to get it:

ART

Welcome to the users forum of <a href="https://art.pixls.us">ART</a>, a free, open-source, cross-platform raw image processing program. ART is a derivative of the popular <a href="http://rawtherapee.com">RawTherapee</a>, trading a bit of customization and control over various processing...

discuss.pixls.us

 

[boojum]

ART supports the 16-bit Linear DNG files that I generate using my Leica M Monochrom. I take in the 14-bit DNG and convert each pixel to 16-Bits using a Gamma Curve, and then create a new file specifying 16-bit pixels. Works fine. I also wrote a version that works with the M9 and M8 to convert to 16-bit pixels with a Gamma curve.

Art also has 16-bit export file formats. I just grabbed this.
View attachment 4852488

Merlin speaks. Gather 'round, kiddies, and learn things. ;o)

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Well, they do not support NATO secondary image transfer file format...

I had to look up JPEG-XL:

JPEG XL - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Looks like beyond JPEG-2000.