Lightroom alternatives which can properly fix TL2 + TL35 Summilux fringing?

[eobet]

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Like anyone who wants to own and not rent, I boycott Adobe.

So are there any alternatives which can properly fix all the green and purple fringing/ca that the Summilux lens produces?

On the PC I've found none. I've even reported it to Affinity several times, but they've only sold a million copies so they claim they're too poor to go and buy the camera and lenses in order to add official support (they rely on an old open-source volunteer database, which felt ok when they were a new company, but not so much anymore... and that database is also abandoned since several years). Luminar also replied to me that they didn't have support but at least didn't rule out adding it in the future, unlike Affinity.

Are there any on the Mac? And I'm not talking about just the base support here, I'm talking about the secret sauce that Leica cooked up with Adobe to overcome the shortcomings of the glass.

iPad is just futile to ask about, I'm guessing...

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[dpitt]

If you did not try Darktable  or Rawtherapee yet, you should have a look.

Both have lens corrections built in and run on Windows/Mac/Linux. Both have features that Lightroom has not so in some ways they are even better than LR.

I use both  on my Mac. Rawtherapee is great for quick edits and is the most intuitive to learn.  Darktable has a steeper learning curve but it can do things that LR can not do e.g. making a custom watermark that embeds the creation date of each photo in the picture (automatically) at export. Also Darktables power for editing is overwhelming, e.g. each module (like exposure adjusting, color calibration...) has the same very powerful masking possibilities built in.

They are free and there are lots of tutorials on Youtube.
One of the best technical developers for Darktable can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@AurelienPIERREphoto/featured

You could ask him directly, or just learn from his tutorials.
For beginners the video's from Bruce can be very helpful
https://www.youtube.com/@audio2u

For Rawtherapee I found this very helpful
https://www.youtube.com/@AndyAstbury

 

[eobet]

Thank you for the tip! I haven't had time to test Darktable yet, but I did try Rawtherapee.

Is there something special I have to do  in order for that app to process Leica TL2 images correctly, because out of the box it behaves just as any other non-Lightroom software (ie like anything not Adobe, it produces frankly embarrassingly crap images from the TL-35 Summilux):

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Left is Rawtherapee, just double clicking the file to open it, and right is Lightroom Classic, again, just double clicking the file to import it. The difference is night and day, which in fact leads me to believe that Rawtherapee also cannot process the magic secret sauce that Adobe and Leica buried in the DNG files.

Edited March 15, 2023 by eobet

[eobet]

Hmm... at least Rawtherapee seems to have room for manual adjustment which actually is a lot better than for example Affinity:

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(But just look at how I need to apply nearly every color on the spectrum... Leica should be properly embarrased, imo!)

I see that you can load curves from a file, so now the question is if anyone has sunk more time into properly figuring out the correct curves here?

[eobet]

Ok, had to do a quick test of Darktable as well... out of the box, it also doesn't read the secret sauce from the DNG but on top of that, it does something weird to the colors that I haven't seen any other software do (weirdly, it also cannot zoom in as much as Lightroom Classic or Rawtherapee):

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Is that pink just there to indicate where the image is blown out, similar to the red effect you can turn on in the camera? But the blacks are also all wrong. But yeah, open source software is usually made by very technical geeks who (naturally) can't afford to hire designers and put an effort into intuitive UX, so there's probably something like that going on here.

Edited March 15, 2023 by eobet

[eobet]

Hmm... despite Darktable not having basically any color channel settings for its defringe/chromatic abberation tools, what it does automatically once you enable those features is pretty darn good! Actually way better than Affinity and on par with the detailed manual tweaking I had to do with Rawtherapee. I must say, after finding the sliders to fix the weird pink thing, I was very quickly able to get something quite close to the jpg output of the camera, which I must say I'm quite impressed by (jpeg left and Darktable right):

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I think we may have a winner! Time to learn more about this intriguing piece of software.

Edited March 15, 2023 by eobet

[dpitt]

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7 hours ago, eobet said:

Hmm... despite Darktable not having basically any color channel settings for its defringe/chromatic abberation tools, what it does automatically once you enable those features is pretty darn good! Actually way better than Affinity and on par with the detailed manual tweaking I had to do with Rawtherapee. I must say, after finding the sliders to fix the weird pink thing, I was very quickly able to get something quite close to the jpg output of the camera, which I must say I'm quite impressed by (jpeg left and Darktable right):

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Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

I think we may have a winner! Time to learn more about this intriguing piece of software.

Just the same experience here with Darktable... A little overwelmed and confused about it. At first glance it is a LR 'clone' but it really isn't at all. There are a lot of modules that work in original ways (e.g. filmic RGB) that have no counterpart in any PP software I know.

Be aware that LR is applying some basic sharpening and other stuff to any RAW file before showing it to you. This sounds great, but if you want to start from what is really captured by the camera (like Rawtherapee and Darktable do) it can be a disadvantage.

From Bruce Williams I learned that every module and slider is designed with affecting only one parameter at a time in mind. Unlike LR where changing one slider will often lead to imbalance in other area's. Much less so with Darktable. It is well worth the time spent getting to know it better IMO. Once you have grasped the basics by watching the tutorials from Bruce Williams, you can explore deeper by watching Aurelien Pierre for example. In this video he shared a style designed for a rapid editing workflow that really works well for me. You can see him use it to recover some nearly hopeless RAW files that get thrown at him in real time by the participants in his live stream (and you can download it to use it yourself):

Its fascinating to see how Aurelien is using his own software and it helps understanding how Darktable (or his modules) are designed.

 

Edited March 15, 2023 by dpitt

[dpitt]

If you have an older LR version like I do. You will not have the standard Adobe camera profiles for it. In this video you can see how you can install the latest profiles by downloading the free RAW converter from Adobe: