Rawtherapee: Cleanup of bundled processing profiles

Created on 12 Dec 2018 · 5Comments · Source: Beep6581/RawTherapee

Some of our bundled processing profiles:

Do not work.
Do things in an over-complicated and outdated way, instead of making use of newer, friendlier tools.
Do things which they shouldn't be doing.
Are not documented.
Are not maintained by anyone.

For example the Faded profiles use the channel mixer for color toning instead of using one of our 7 dedicated color toning tools. If a user feels that "faded chocolate" is a bit too chocolate, it's not a simple and intuitive adjustment to change that. Furthermore, the channel mixer values stored in that profile no longer work (fallout from #4805), and even if they were updated, the profile still does not work - the channel mixer is not enabled. Who knows what else. Lastly, the profile does things it should not be doing - a profile intended for color toning has no business changing the noise reduction settings.

I want to remove the following unmaintained profiles for 5.5:

Black-and-White (main argument: they're almost identical)
Faded (broken, made obsolete by new and much more user-friendly color toning tools)
Generic (broken and not interesting, don't work with histogram matching, intention not documented)
Portrait
Skintones (not documented, partially broken)

I've seen posts by people who had tried RawTherapee and reported that all the presets look bad. Not surprising. I hope that removing these unmaintained profiles will prevent that. We can work on new profiles for 5.6.

sidecar

Source

Beep6581

👍5

Most helpful comment

Hey @dogo77

You can find them here:
https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/tree/5.4/rtdata/profiles

New tools bring new possibilities. There will be new profiles in 5.6.

Beep6581 on 17 Dec 2018

👍4

All 5 comments

I tried a faded profile just now, and the effect looked weird mostly because it doesn't enable the tools it modify. So :+1:

Hombre57 on 13 Dec 2018

Deleted unmaintained profiles in 1e45112d4 , updated other profiles in c8042271d.

Beep6581 on 17 Dec 2018

Hi,
i just updated RT to 5.5 and the first thing i missed were the bundled profiles… :D
Although most profiles didn't fit my nedds/taste i have been a heavy user of the skintones/TM preset as they worked very well with my ILCE-6000 and geve the desired look.

So 2 Questions from my side:
1) Where can i find the old presets for downloading and reimporting them? In an older branch?
2) will they really come back in 5.6? ;)

i for my side can't corroborate "that all the presets look bad." As a more or less very unexperienced user (i just started shooting raw in August '18) they gave me a good start with nice output files right from the start and made me start learning RT over DT.

NTL, Thanks for that release!