Correctly setting the light and shadows in night shots(RAW Therapee 2.4)

             The second-hand SLR was inexpensive and can record RAW fi les, but there was no converter program in the package. You still want to use the advantages of the professional format for night shots.
             This is a clear case for the RAW Therapee converter (www.rawtherapee.com). The tool offers many controllers, especially when it comes to exposure, targeted adjustment of lights and shadows, and it can keep up with expensive commercial converters. You can also sharpen images, and remove image noise and lens errors. In version 2.4, RAW Therapee also supports managing of EXIF and IPTC Metadata. We explain the tool’s functioning with the help of a night shot.

ANALYZING THE IMAGE: After transferring to the PC, open the RAW photo by navigating to the specifi c folder. The image preview and the histogram show that dark areas are predominant. This is correct in case of a night shot. When you check the lights, you can see whether only the street lamps are actually cutting down the bright tonal values (‘clipping’).
SETTING WHITE BALANCE: Change to the ‘Color’. RAW Therapee shows a color temperature of 4,750 Kelvin for the sample image. Actually, the image seems to have a red tint. Set the value to 3,000 Kelvin. This makes the image look more natural. In order to correctly bring out the blue color of the dome, increase the blue proportion to ‘120’ in the channel mixer under ‘Blue’. Since the sum of the color controllers should be 100, so that the brightness remains constant, decrease the ‘Red’ and ‘Green’ proportions by ‘-10’.
ADJUSTING LIGHTS: Change to the ‘Exposure’ tab. Here, activate ‘Detail’ and set the magnifying glass to highlight. Move the ‘Exposure correction’ controller to the left and reduce the brightness such that the clipping warning disappears. Using ‘Restore lights’, try to bring out as many details as possible in the street lighting. READJUSTING EXPOSURE: Increase the exposure of the medium tonal values using the tonal value curve. With this, you can brighten up the building and the streets. Alternatively, you can also try the ‘Luminosity curve’, which aff ects the brightness channel of the LAB color space.
DENOISING AND SHARPENING: Like in many night shots, this one also has numerous disturbing pixels. For this, change to ‘Detail’ and activate the ‘Luminosity fi lter’ and the ‘Color noise fi lter’. Use the magnifying glass to search for a noisy section and set the controllers. The image uses sharpness due to fi ltering, and you can compensate this using the ‘Sharpness’ controller. Here, you need to be extremely careful, since sharpness and image noise have a negative eff ect on each other.
SAVING THE IMAGE: Click ‘Save as’ on the lower right side near ‘Save picture’ and specify name, format and target folder there. If ‘Save immediately’ is activated, the tool develops the image with the new settings on clicking ‘OK’ and fi nally saves the digital print in the target folder.