Working with image editing software like Lightroom and the free Rawtherapee is basically the same. Some things is located in different places and some are named differently.
I have not integrated it in any automated way, it is all manually. If you want to use it from the command line, you can edit an image and process all the others from the command line using the pp3 file it creates, see Command-Line Options - RawPedia . Such an approch is great if you have too images to hand edit.
My manual process is:
- I browse to the image directory.
- I find an image that represents the general state of the majority.
- I take a lot of time editing this image. I try to make it look as natural as I can without spending the whole day. This may include:
- Changing brightness
- Changing white balance
- Adding more vibrant
- Making shadows lighter
- Pulling details out of bright
- Adding contrast on certain detail levels
- Adding graduate filter (makes e.g. the sky darker)
When I have this image that represents the general edit, I go to the thumb nails view and copy the image. I then select the first group of image which is going to have the same treatment. This may be 3 images or 20. I then paste the settings onto these. Then (with all images selected) I may adjust the brightness. Then I go onto the next part.
When I progress the image may have to be lighter or darker than the settings I copied. I then copy a new general template.
This takes about 30 minutes for 1000 images. Because my Ricoh Theta S only takes an image every 8 seconds I usually do not have more. It takes longer time when you have not done image editing before, but you will learn it.
Finally I put all the images to the rendering queue and lets the computer do the rest.