Transitioning to RawTherapee and GIMP-People on the railway

grebeman

Old Codgers Group
During the recent SIJ I took the opportunity to transition from processing my images in ACR or DxO Optics and Photoshop to RawTherapee and GIMP.

I think I've now cracked it, certainly in terms of monochrome, and have been processing many of my older images. Over the years I've taken many at the South Devon Railway and have been surprised at how many I have of the people at work on the line. These go back to 2012 or 2013 and the cameras are either the Panasonic G1 or GH2 often with the Panasonic 14-45mm zoom.

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Level crossing keeper at Staverton

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Coupling up at Buckfastleigh

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On the footplate of 1369

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On the footplate of 3205

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A quick chat with the guard at Staverton

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A break between turns at Buckfastleigh

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Waiting for the road

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Snatching a cuppa

Barrie
 
I do like the monochrome processing you'v done here.

I do see a low level "grain" if you will...is this intentionally added or is this an oversharpening artifact of sensor noise?

It's not an intentional addition of grain. I must admit I was tempted to not apply sharpening when I saw the images. The sharpening has been applied in GIMP using a method that only applies sharpening to the luminence channel, which replicates how I used to do it in Photoshop where I converted the image to Lab mode, deselected the a and b channels and only applied sharpening to the L channel bfore converting the image back to RGB.

Sharpening was turned off in RawTherapee.

In GIMP I applied the sharpening to a duplicate layer and then lowered the opacity of that layer where I thought it was oversharpened before merging the layers. The script for luminence sharpening is an add on and the default level appears to be quite low unlike the default level of the normal unsharp mask which is far too high.

Perhaps further experimentation is required with this issue.

Barrie
 
During the recent SIJ I took the opportunity to transition from processing my images in ACR or DxO Optics and Photoshop to RawTherapee and GIMP.

I think I've now cracked it, certainly in terms of monochrome, and have been processing many of my older images. Over the years I've taken many at the South Devon Railway and have been surprised at how many I have of the people at work on the line. These go back to 2012 or 2013 and the cameras are either the Panasonic G1 or GH2 often with the Panasonic 14-45mm zoom.

View attachment 133161
Level crossing keeper at Staverton

View attachment 133162
Coupling up at Buckfastleigh

View attachment 133163
On the footplate of 1369

View attachment 133164
On the footplate of 3205

View attachment 133165
A quick chat with the guard at Staverton

View attachment 133166
A break between turns at Buckfastleigh

View attachment 133167
Waiting for the road

View attachment 133168
Snatching a cuppa

Barrie

Always loved your railway shots, Barrie. These have worked out really well... i like the processing.

Didnt you have one of a train which was steaming along? That one was really impressive, hope to see it re-done soonish :)
 
It's not an intentional addition of grain. I must admit I was tempted to not apply sharpening when I saw the images. The sharpening has been applied in GIMP using a method that only applies sharpening to the luminence channel, which replicates how I used to do it in Photoshop where I converted the image to Lab mode, deselected the a and b channels and only applied sharpening to the L channel bfore converting the image back to RGB.

Sharpening was turned off in RawTherapee.

In GIMP I applied the sharpening to a duplicate layer and then lowered the opacity of that layer where I thought it was oversharpened before merging the layers. The script for luminence sharpening is an add on and the default level appears to be quite low unlike the default level of the normal unsharp mask which is far too high.

Perhaps further experimentation is required with this issue.

Barrie

I was just curious if those tools, which I admit I know very little about GIMP and nothing of RAW Therapee, had anything like in Lightroom where there is a sharpening mask that can be leveraged to only sharpen edges and leave blocks of color alone as to minimize any oversharpening artifacts.
 
I was just curious if those tools, which I admit I know very little about GIMP and nothing of RAW Therapee, had anything like in Lightroom where there is a sharpening mask that can be leveraged to only sharpen edges and leave blocks of color alone as to minimize any oversharpening artifacts.

Andrew, both RawTherapee and GIMP include a variety of sharpening methods other than just unsharp mask. I have to admit that I've never tried any other method than unsharp mask even when I used Photoshop. I tried a couple of different methods on an image yesterday evening using RT and was struggling to see a great deal of difference, however my efforts probably need to be repeated in a more controlled manner. RT also includes a sharpening method for images that are downsized at output which apparently requires different levels of sharpening. RT would seem to have thought out a great number of ways of tackling things involved in image processing, it just takes a lot of time to get your head around what these do and how they should be manipulated, or in other words a steep learning curve.

Barrie
 
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