The Budget Kingfisher’s Big Reveal

Well no, it’s not some magical recovery job – this is just a plain RAW file, shown in Neutral. But yeah… it is very dark. So the question becomes: can you still make something out of it in RawTherapee?

Absolutely! RawTherapee’s bag of tricks can handle way worse than this. And honestly, with just a few simple steps, the job was done. No over-the-top editing here—I deliberately kept things modest. Sure, I could push it further, but I actually like how it turned out just like this.

And believe it or not, I barely touched it. Here’s what I did:

First step after opening the RAW in Neutral: I applied a Natural Adobe camera profile using the Color Management tool – this made it even darker 🙂 but wait !

Then I hit the Auto Levels button in the Exposure tab. That alone boosted the exposure all the way up to a whopping +2.25—plus a bit of automatic contrast for good measure.

My real contribution was in the Shadows and Highlights tool. I pulled back the highlights by 75%, pushed the shadows up to 60%, and dropped the radius from 40 down to 5—that brought out the bird’s chest feathers much more clearly. Honestly, that already did most of the heavy lifting.

Final touches? A bit of Sharpening (1.0 / 250), some Denoising (50 / 81.12%), Cropped it down to roughly 2600x1500px, and Resized to 1920px wide.

And… that’s it!

A few notes on the choices I made – in case you’re wondering “why not do more?”

The radius in the Shadows and Highlights tool was lowered from 40 to 5 for a reason: a smaller radius means the adjustments affect finer details, which in this case helped bring out the feather texture in the bird’s chest without lifting the whole background and losing contrast.

I didn’t use Tone Mapping here—though it’s a powerful tool, it tends to give a more dramatic, almost HDR-like effect, which I didn’t feel suited this shot. Sometimes subtlety wins.

And yes, there’s room to finesse things—color toning, maybe some local adjustments—but this was more about seeing how far you can go with a few quick, simple tweaks. Mission accomplished, I’d say. 😉