I will continue using Darktable as I really like its profiled lens correction feature and its great interface, but maybe I should consider a dedicated noise reduction application to complement Darktable. When looking at the beach foot of the sea gull statue at 1:1, one can clearly see that the Olympus OOC JPEG has both more detail and less noise. Unfortunately the opposite appears to be true when using Darktable for noise reduction:ĭarktable JPEG, profiled denoise with the XZ-1 profile for the used ISO value, 100% quality chosen during export I must say that I was a bit disappointed by the results, I was hoping to get some extra detail and less noise by shooting RAW, especially as my XZ-1 is quite dated. I just shot another few test shots, this time in RAW+JPG to compare the Darktable JPEGs with the OOC JPEGs from my Olympus. The processed JPEG from Rawtherapee of my second test shot (also ISO 1600)Īt last I chose Darktable this week, because of the great interface and the profiles for my XZ-1. The processed JPEG from Rawtherapee of my first test shot ISO 1600 with a 1/1.7 inch compact) I hope this tiny comparison is useful to someone And Darktable's user interface, its awesome catalog of modules and great managing abilities remain very tempting. I'm still torn between these great programs, as while Darktable may have lost by quite a high margin at high ISO noise reduction, the question is how many shots I actually take that have so much noise, plus I will be upgrading to a M4/3 camera in the near future which will have significantly lower noise levels. Of course these are the first two raw images I have ever converted, so perhaps someone else can achieve better results? I will include links to the original ORFs and to both the JPEGs of Darktable and Rawtherapee and their sidecar files (.pp3 and. I got the best result in Darktable with the profiled denoise module in wavelets mode, amazingly it had a profile for my XZ-1 again! Who would've thought my modest XZ-1 would be one of the 100 profiled cameras! Now I am not the type of post processor who expects images completely devoid of any noise, in fact I don't mind a bit of luminance noise if I get more detail in return, but I'm sure you understand that I don't want to see obvious chroma noise in my images. But despite my best efforts the Darktable's JPEG of my first test shot contains A LOT more noise, especially chrominance, than the Rawtherapee one. So you probably understand that I did everthing I could to try to make Darktable's result match Rawtherapee's JPEG. Another nice touch was that whereas I had to manually choose the amount of lens correction in Rawtherapee, Darktable automatically detected my XZ-1 and I was able to apply lens correction with just 1 click! Pretty impressive! Darktable's user interface is a lot cleaner to me and I really like its managing capabilities and all the modules. From the moment I understood Darktable's user interface on, I really wanted it to win. And after a bit of reading on Rawpedia, I was able to process the two test shots easily. At first the Rawtherapee user interface was a bit intimidating, but I soon got the hang of it. They can be seen at the end of this post. Because I didn't have a low light/high ISO raw image yet, I decided to create my very own DPR-style test shots in low light (a.k.a. Because both had similar capability, one of the deciding factors would be their noise reduction abilities, because my XZ-1's sensor is really starting to show its age when cranking up the ISO value. So I installed both Rawtherapee (4.2.521, the latest version for OS X) and Darktable (2.0.1). I had already read that these two were pretty close to each other in terms of capability. Because I wanted an all-in-one solution for managing and processing my pictures with a nice user interface and not several programs stringed together, it became Darktable vs Rawtherapee. Of course as a former Linux user I had already heard of applications like Darktable, Rawtherapee, UFRAW and dcraw, but never actually used them. I decided against the Photos app because of the interface and reports of people having it fail on them (including a DPR member). So I had 2 choices basically: try a free (and open source) raw converter or use the Apple Photos app with the 10 euro DxO raw extension. I have been wanting to try Raw for a while, because I have severely limited funds (and I want to buy my first ILC this year ) I sure wasn't going to spend $100 on Lightroom or $130 on DxO Optics Pro.
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