Fast photo editing for a travel photo

When taking photos while traveling, most of the time, you don't have time to spend on taking the best photo. Moreover, you cannot spend more than a few minutes for post-processing per photo because when you travel you are expected to take a lot of photos. In this post, we will edit a picture taken from a trip to Amsterdam and make minimal changes. Although the conditions were ideal, in the middle of the day and with plenty of light, the final result was not optimal. With the RawTherapee, we will try to improve the photo within a few minutes.

Original overexposed photo.

When opening the picture, we can see at the center there is an overexposed area. This happens because RawTherapee cannot correctly calculate the values for exposure. The sky is also too bright and not as blue as we would like. 

So, the first thing to do when opening the picture is to fix the exposure. We reset the exposure by pressing the reset the curve to linear in the tone curve and then we press the “Auto Levels” button. In most cases, we only need to make minor changes in exposure. In this photo, we have to reduce the exposure slightly to -0.32 and increase the highlight compression threshold to around 120. 

Comparison of different highlight recovery methods.

Finally, we ensure that the checkbox for highlight recovery is enabled.  RawTherapee supports four ways of highlighting reconstruction. Luminance Recovery that recovers the highlights in natural gray. Color propagation works well if the highlight compression is less than 500. The CIELab first reduces the luminance channel and tries to restore color. Finally, the Blend uses the color of nearby regions. In our case, Color Propagation has the best results.

Zoom-in before defringe.

Zoom-in after defringe.

Next, if we zoom to the windows on the right, we will notice purple fringes on the edges. This is called fringing. To fix this we enable the defringe tool, in the details tab. We can see now that the red color of the brick is washed out. To fix this we have to use a different curve type. There are two different curve types to apply the tool. Linear and Hue. We select hue, and only the colors we want to remove from the edges.

Defringe tool of RawTherapee.

In the detail tab, we can also enable the contrast by details to increase sharpness. We only need to slightly increase the sharpness, so we increase only slightly the bars.

Contrast by details tool of RawTherapee.

Color editing is another improvement we can do in this photo. The color tab contains all the tools for editing the color parameters of the picture. The first thing we should change is the white balance. We increase the temperature slightly. We do not want to touch any more settings in the color tab, because the picture is close enough to what we expect.

We will not touch the advanced tab now, although we can enable Retinex and by selecting the process "Unsharp mask" to improve the overall contrast. 

Transform settings of RawTherapee.

Next, we have to fix the perspective of the photo. First, we go to the “Perspective” tab and we move the vertical bar to the right. In this picture, a value around 7 is enough. Next, we have to press the “Automatic” button in the “Distortion Correction” section. Finally, in the RAW tab, we must ensure that the Demosaicing algorithm is AMaZE and the Auto-correction is checked in the Chromatic Aberration Correction.

Our photo is now ready to be exported. You can export by either pressing CTRL+S or place it in the queue to process it later from the “Queue” tab. 

You can download the RAW photo and the profile for free from here!