Raw pictures have different colors in fullscreen view and while editing

Help
1

Hi,
I am using Digikam 8.1 (but I have been using it since 6.7 or so), and this has always happened to me, the color balance is different when I see my raw images and when I edit them. In edit mode they look paler, with less saturation.
I don’t know if I might have change any settings which I should restart, or whether it is supposed to work this way, but I haven’t been able to solve it. Is there anything I should try?

2

That is because any previews will be shown using the camera processed embedded thumbnail (about 1000px in size). Once in a RAW editor, they will indeed appear washed out and desaturated. This is because they have not been developed yet. That is your job. One of the things I do is shoot raw/jpg simultaneously, that way I have a full size camera processed jpg to reference if needed (though I almost never do).

While Digicam is a great program for maintaining a library of images, I find its raw editing abilities poor - too course. I suggest you edit RAW using RawTherapee. It has extremely fine control over every aspect of RAW development. It will use the embedded thumbnail to try to present a pre-developed image that is similar to the embedded jpeg as a starting point, and frankly, it does a great job.

I believe Digicam can export to an external RAW editor, and IIRC it can use an embedded RawTherapee page, but I seem to recall that not working correctly, so I just develop in RawTherapee, and export from there to GiMP for processing.

3

Thank you for your answer.

So right now I use Rawtherapee to develop them, and I’ve tried Lightroom. I’m just asking because I want to use the “Export to iNaturalist” tool from Digikam for pictures that I haven’t developed yet or won’t develop at all.
The thing is, I can’t upload the raws directly, so what I want is a quick way to develop the images directly from digikam, but with the colors from any other program. When I open the edit tool from Rawtherapee or Lightroom the staring point is the image as in the JPG or the embedded thumbnail, but Digikam is the odd one out.

Is there any preset that can be changed so that the default starting point for raw developing has the camera colors?

4

I would use the batch processing feature of RawTherapee.

https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Batch_Adjustments_-_Sync

Then add a catalog of the processed files in digicam and import to it, then use it to upload to iNaturalist.