[graeme83]

Anyone tried the wavelets tab in raw therapee yet? I think its fairly new, and there is very little documentation about it, I updated my copy the other night and noticed it, seemed very daunting with a lot of options.
From what I can tell it combines sharpening, noise reduction, toning, contrast etc.. all in one workflow and seems pretty powerful to boot.

I had a little play with it today, mostly randomly seeing what the sliders did! But I managed to bring out some impressive detail in some flower petals, the normal processed version is on the left, the wavelet version on the right.

IMGP9075 Pink, Wavelets

Now I am not happy with the background, and I really dont know what most of it does but I want to know more.
This is all I could find from a quick google search which I will be reading through later http://scribble-jpc.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/first-view-wavelet-tool.html
and https://rawtherapeewavelets.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/wavelets-in-rawtherapee...-introduction/

[MSL]

I can't give you much of an answer. As far as I recall they update the manual pretty regularly so hopefully they will document this soon. I agree with you about the background on the wavelet adjusted image. By adding detail to the background it makes it less appealing. Because it is mostly green you may be able to tweak it by playing with the green channel. Otherwise, you need a selective mask to blur out the background.

If I get a chance I'll upgrade and give it a try. Thanks for posting about this upgrade.

[MSL]

From the Raw Therapeee documentation page:
RawTherapee Blog

There are a list of tutorials, including this one on wavelets that may be of some help. Note that it is very much a tool under development
scribble's scribbles: First View--The Wavelet Tool