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.
@tryl, have you since your last post done any automation?
I would like to add this to my automation to improve the images. Is there a “just make it better option”? Or do I need to set some general options?
I want to “fully automate” my workflow (I now simply dump all the MP4, JPG files and the GPX of a session in a folder and run my script, after setting a few basis settings)
I use to do some automation using imagemagick. It’s been a while so I dont remember the syntax, but it is possible to use a subset of the main image (more ground than sky) to set various autobalance, gamma etc numbers to then be applied to the whole image. Mogrify will do an entire directory so easy to do in daily batches.
Also possible to examine the whole image but since capture often has a lot of sky it’s best to use a subset.
I was also using automation to repair the colour cast as the camera (webcam) IR filter was “bleaching” from age.
@eesger I have not done any automation in relation to image improovement. I also think it is fairly limited what is possible:
Cameras already tries to improve the image in software as much as possible because it makes them look better. Some times this includes too much sharpening and oversaturating of colors to make the images appear better. That is pretty much the only thing we can do too, without looking at images.
When photographing for Mapillary we pretty much always use automatic exposure and automatic white balancing. It usually gives a reasonable result without the need to adjust parameters for each images, but you will get the dark images when the are thin cloud cover and blue images in dusk and snow. In other conditions the images are not perfect, but not as bad. In these cases we need a human to adjust them to improve them.
White balance usually only changes when moving between Sun and shadow but exposure changes just by moving the camera.
A camera usually exposes the image by calculating the average grey value of an area that is either the whole picture or a part of the center. On a perfectly exposed image this is “18% grey” which is the color of grey cards used for exposing. Unfortunately a black house will make the image appear darker than a white house, i.e. the house affects the exposure of other objects in the image.
But a JPG is stripped for any extra information so it is not possible to bring extra detail into a picture, like you can with raw. You can make it appear better and make it easier to see but actually you cannot improve it.