The Ultimate Beginners' Guide to #rawtherapee

This is an absolute beginners' guide to RawTherapee - a free, open source and extremely capable RAW processor.

Use timestamps below to easily navigate this monstrosity of a video.

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:30 1kwords Channel Title Theme
00:00:42 Reasoning & Setting Expectations
00:02:39 Where to Get RawTherapee
00:03:50 Tour of the Interface
00:28:02 Post Processing
00:28:48 Defining Terms
00:30:26 Exposure Compensation & Lightness
00:31:35 Highlight Compression, Recovery & Reconstruction
00:35:43 Vignette
00:36:49 Graduated Filter
00:38:44 Sharpening
00:39:36 Noise Reduction & Types of Noise
00:42:13 Defringe & Chromatic Aberrations
00:44:52 White Balance & Best Practices
00:47:50 Saturation & Vibrance
00:49:10 Cropping & Rotating
00:51:36 Actual Post Processing
00:52:02 Image 1
01:02:26 Image 2
01:07:52 Image 3
01:10:46 Image 4
01:14:22 Image 5
01:17:30 Exporting the Images
01:18:16 Outro

The video was filmed with the DJI Osmo Pocket.
The montage was done in DaVinci Resolve on Arch Linux.

Watch some more of my videos:
Carl Zeiss Jena Pancolar 50mm f/1.8 Review

[stevesugden]

Thanks Radu. I am new to the world of raw image processing and I think you have hit your objective of providing a "zero to hero" guide perfectly.

[evertelling]

This guide made a program that seemed to be daunting to start with suddenly a whole lot less daunting! :)
The continuous editing of the 4 pictures at the end also gives great insight on the regular workflow in the program. That really helped that extra little bit. Superb!

[iStacie]

Thank you so much for this tutorial. It is excellent! It answered so, so many of my questions.

[Sica]

This is just what I was looking for. Thanks.

[joakimboulanger]

great guide man, no it wasnt super quick but i loved to follow along so i think it was perfect

[philsmith]

This is an amazing tutorial. It's so detailed yet so easy to follow. Each step is clearly explained.

[teodorp]

Amazing tutorial. Really helped me out.

[ouder]

Absolute awesome. In one evening you've managed to teach me alot! tysm

[StephenSweet]

Thank you for a great tutorial. Just the right level of detail on each topic depending on its importance. Brilliant work.

[danlang]

This video included everything I need as a beginner and is SO easy to follow. Great work.

[gfraccal]

Thank you so much Radu! I downloaded Raw Therapee last week and I couldn't find a good tutorial for an "absolute beginner" like me. I'm glad that you took the time to explain the basic stuff and you were never boring. I hope you' ll go on with other tutorials. You are a very good teacher.

[santybaba]

This is a wonderful beginner's guide to Rawtherapee Radu. Thank you!

[ulifischer]

Really nice! I found a good and simple practice for luminance noise is just cranking both sliders up to 100 and then reducing only detail recovery, mostly to some value between 60 and 90.

[Kiwicruiser]

The best tutorial on using this programme. Thank you for the time and effort you have put into this video.

[InterstellarRanger]

I'm new to all of this.. and I can tell instinctively that you have saved me hours and hours of frustration trying to find this information in different places. Great teaching style very easy to follow and understand. Thankyou!!

[sveeny]

I'm migrating from Adobe to Affinity for obvious reasons and was looking for a raw editor that fits my needs more than the Affinity one does. I'm having an absolute blast discovering how elegant of a tool Rawtherapee is! Thank you so much for showing me around! Only thing I've missed (maybe I wasn't attentive or maybe you thought this was too advanced for a beginner tutorial) was saving/loading/copying processing profiles so you can add the same adjustments to a batch of images that you probably took in the same location. Also applying LUT's and using the Rawtherapee Film Simulation collection as a creative starting point for (some) photographers is quite a cool feature. Batch editing, LUT's and profiles could be an idea for a future video? I'm sure people would appreciate and I'm sure I'm missing some stuff that I yet have to learn or bad habits that I have to unlearn.
Again, I find that this tutorial covered almost everything that I needed to know with the basic handling and file management and I'm very thankful! All the best to you!

[jamesmcmullan]

Great tutorial, much appreciated. Thank you

[eclank]

Thank you very much! As a complete beginner this tutorial was extremely useful. Very well structured and clearly explained. I’d love to watch more advanced tutorials in the future :)

[kritmil]

Thanks for putting this together! Do you plan on adding more videos like this in the future, maybe some more advanced techniques?

[TheWutang]

Incredibly helpful video! I normally just shoot jpegs and am usually happy with the results from my Fuji but wanted to get into raw processing for those images I just want a little more out of or didn't turn out the way I wanted. Definitely made this feel a whole lot less intimidating