@LateJunction My ah ha moment with the tone eq was to use two or three instances and to keep the adjustments of a reasonable magnitude. Even with a pretty good mask random dodging and burning I find messes things up. I often use one instance just to target darker regions and then add more instances for contrast or other adjustments…I found in this way I did not have to rely on the mask settings. I pretty much just use the simple tone curve preset. That seems to land my histogram in the middle even sometimes and then I just make a small adjustment. For bigger global changes I try to use blend modes to help. When I first started with the TE I saw some videos doing random adjustments but this rarely worked for me…someone may read this and say you just need a better mask …but I think I have heard others taking the same approach…thats my shared experience for what it is worth…Understanding what you want to achieve goes a long way and may be one of the hardest things (its hard for me) …For example @s7habo recently demonstrated how to mimic a LR preset. He explains how he looks at the image and how he attacks it and most importantly he reorders the modules to achieve that. When you take this sort of informed logical approach your are not constantly pushing and pulling image tones and colors …you attack one part and then the other and you reorder the module so that they don’t interfere with the process…However this is not the sort of thing you will ever get from a manual…Check this out…How to use Darktable to acheive stylized image effects - #5 by s7habo
Back to the topic of documentation:
There are four kinds of documentation that need to exist to cover all the bases.
- learning-oriented tutorials
- goal-oriented how-to guides
- understanding-oriented discussions
- information-oriented reference material
This forum provides understanding-oriented discussions thanks to the people who author the tools, and the manuals for darktable and RawTherapee are very information-oriented for when you want to know what something does, but the other two are lacking.
I know Pat started PIXLS.US itself hoping to make a place for more tutorial type content, but most of the activity has been concentrated on the forum side of things rather than the website.
Goal-oriented guides are missing overall. There need to be lists of desired end results, like “My red flower petals are turning nuclear, how do I fix this?”, each with potentially several ways to achieve the result.
In Filmulator’s case I rely on the fact that the tools are few in number to help guide the user, but the other more powerful applications need to provide more guidance for a user who has an idea of what they want but not how to get it.
Writing is hard and time consuming. We welcome submissions.
We get a lot of good tid bits in here, but even organizing them is time consuming.
Also videos are good here.
I keep meaning to redo my intro to Filmulator video but I can’t seem to get through it in one take and don’t want to edit together multiples ugh…
Perfection is the enemy of done.
The ‘invalid’ (non-)issue has been discussed several times. It’s not an error indication. Some examples:
I think this is key. The darktable manual right now is very much like the manual you get with your camera. The camera manual tells you what all the settings do, but it doesn’t help you with how to approach your photography and take better photos. Similarly, the darktable manual doesn’t really help you learn how to approach editing of a particular photo. Arguably, that’s not the job of the manual, but these kinds of resources need to exist.
If we look at some of the commercial software out there, there are lots of tutorials on specific techniques: “How to sharpen in x”, “How to make your photos pop in x”, “How to colour grade” etc. Then there are tutorials on specific genres of photography: “Portrait photography in x”, “Create stunning landscapes in x”, “Better night photography…” etc. These goal-oriented how-tos are wildly popular and very useful (the good ones at least).
The darktable series by Bruce Williams is excellent and essential viewing for new users. But it by and large still takes a similar approach to the manual, i.e. “this is what each module does”. Bruce has done some more workflow-based videos to help with a particular photography style, but there are not many of these tutorials out there in the wild.
So why aren’t there? I have a feeling it’s simply that there aren’t enough experts at darktable. I spend a lot of time on here and on the Reddit and Facebook darktable groups, and almost everyone is still learning how to use it. After two years of using darktable myself, I still feel I could only do basic tutorials, and even then it would probably be a more “drag this slider until it looks good” approach, because I couldn’t explain when to use Bilateral grid or Local Laplacian Filter, for example. I simply have no idea.
Which brings me to my next point, which is the UI. The addition of more tooltips in recent builds is a big step forward, but they are still very technical, and many tools don’t have them. darktable is excellent for the sheer amount of options it offers the user, but of course this can be overwhelming. I would welcome more goal-oriented tooltips of the type “Adjust this to boost x”, “Turn this down if you see halos” etc. I know this could be very tricky, but I’m just wondering how we can help demystify some of the more obscure labels like “RGB Euclidian Norm” and “Bias correction”.
Incidentally, i wonder if the “Invalid” label in the color calibration module should just be removed. It seems to always scare people until they come across one of the threads that tells them not to worry.
the best of these turorials are never made by the company that makes the software, but by users of that software.
Isn’t this always what we are doing?
This is when you go to the manual, look up what they do, then play with those options until you understand it.
Here also plays a role sponsorship and competition between the beneficiaries (photographers or photo studios) who also offer services. Youtube is full of such sponsored content.
Good tutorials do not scratch the surface, but offer more in-depth knowledge that is independent of the tool used. This also means that the person offering the tutorial must have this knowledge and be well prepared.
But it also means that people who use darktble can also learn a lot from these tutorials. From topics that concern general knowledge such as color theory, to the use of concrete modules such as curves, local contrast, channel mixer, color balance etc. there are countless tutorials for another software that you can watch and then apply in darktable.
And also the topics that you have mentioned as examples are software-independent:
I will rather say, there are few professional photographers who use darktable, who are able to offer well-founded tutorials. This must change.
Precisely. I feel that I’m at a point where I’m comfortable with darktable and can translate other software features it’s modules, but all too often tutorials that you’ll find for a style wind up being advertisements for someone’s LUTs or presets.
And frankly, I’m not interested in a canned product that’ll deliver a look (although I understand that a professional might need something like that for consistency).
I don’t even like using the DT color mapping because I’m not interested in copying someone’s style. What I want to do is improve my skills behind the camera and at the computer screen to create the look I’m after at that moment in time.
I fully agree. And similarly, the “drag this slider until it looks good” approach is not really useful for me either. I can futz around with sliders all day until things look good, we don’t need tutorials for that. I really appreciate it when Bruce/Aurélien et al really try and explain what is going on with the slider, when it should it be used, when it shouldn’t, which module to use first, what particular technique it is good for, etc. It’s the old teaching how to fish rather than giving a fish analogy…
I’m not saying I have an answer. We just need more experts who have the will and the time to make these kinds of resources. Making great educational content is very time consuming.
I hope not, or at least that’s what I try not to do. I’ve been spending a lot of time recently studying pictures to try to decompose why a look has that look and then I use the modules as I understand them to approach that style.
I don’t pretend to have the answer either. I have the utmost respect for Bruce, Aurélien, Rico, and others who take the time to explain what’s under the hood… often over and over again. I’m not sure I have that patience. And of course the play raws and Boris’ editing moments are incredibly useful.
I would say that instead of asking if someone would kindly produce a whole new round of tutorials, I think more discussion here on this site on the creative side of editing would go a long way. At least that’s my thought.
Regarding your remarks on the luminance estimator description on the tone equaliser page, I agree it is quite terse. The reason we didn’t put more detail there was that luminance estimators are used in several places, and we didn’t want to be repeating information in the manual that can then become inconsistent.
The logical thing would be to place a reference to the description in the general Darkroom>Processing Midules>Curves section. However, that section itself refers to the “preserve chrominance” parameter description in the FilmicRGB reference page.
So, if you go to the FilmicRGB page, you’ll get some information about possible use cases for the different estimators.
@elstoc, maybe we need to try to organise this a bit better.
Yes perhaps so. Could you raise an issue please.
done:
Concerning the OP’s remarks about the preserve details description, I thought we’d already explained that the purpose of this is to preserve local contrast across edges where required, and the GF masks can be disabled if for some reason someone wants a simple tone mapping that doesn’t try to preserve local contrast.
I’m don’t know what more we can say in this section, as it is heavily dependent on the details of the image and what the user is trying to achieve. We’ve tried to communicate the key concepts behind what the module doing, but maybe this needs to be reinforced by modeling some actual examples. This would be getting beyond the scope of the user manual however. So, I’m not sure what to do…
While not at all wishing to appear rude, ungrateful or unreasonably demanding, I have to say that my personal feeling is that I don’t ‘see’ the key darktable module concepts being sufficiently well explained in a way that is compatible with my basic level of knowledge of the product, with the physics of light and how the human brain interprets that physics and with good photographic principles. Modelling some actual examples would be of considerable interest to me, except that I see videos on YouTube which can make me an expert on developing a fine image of a particular insect in a certain forest, in a certain part of the world, on a given day and time of the year, under quoted weather conditions, taken from a certain position with a given set of aperture, shutter, ISO, camera, lens and filter. But for other images with different parameters I’m still lost!
The last solution I want to see to that scenario is to make even more use of ‘AI sky replacements’. The logical conclusion to this wonderful marketing buzz-word - AI - is to have some device that uses AI to decide what photo I want, takes it and then does all the post-processing for me - hopefully including deleting the damn thing afterwards.
‘futzing around’ in image development (as an earlier post stated it) is the source of a significant part of the pleasure I get from photography. But I can’t experience that pleasure if I don’t know what I’m doing, and, emphatically, if somebody else is doing it for me with AI apps (the emphasis clearly on the ‘artificial’, rather than the ‘Intelligence’)
What steps would you take in an image editor that you’re comfortable with to make an image that you’re happy with?
Also if you do want to see your image edited, we have the Play Raws, where you’re welcome to describe what you think is missing or offer some challenge to the community to solve.
Just curious, when you watch these videos and become an expert in developing insect pictures, what does this mean? Does it mean you have memorised a procedure that you can then reproduce with similar pictures? Have you managed to get an understanding of why the procedure contains these specific steps, what was the rationale behind the steps? When you try to generalise this procedure to other images, what happens? Is the whole image messed up, or are there just some limited aspects of the new image that ha e come up disappointing? In that case, the fundamentals might be ok, but just some small set of additional specific knowledge or skill is required to deal with that specific problem.
I’m not sure how far a user manual can go as a learning resource. It’s certainly one input, but some more general learning in the domain of image processing may also be required.
Aurélien Pierre made some videos that dig into some of the more basic concepts when he was developing the filmic module. How did you find that material? Was it clear? Did it assume too much background knowledge? Did you understand it, but are still somehow unsure of how to apply that knowledge?
This is something that comes up a lot, so I just curious about your take on it.
Respectfully, I think you missed my cheap attempt at sarcasm. I found a notable example on line which attempts to teach me how to use a specific raw processor (It wasn’t darktable) but which was so specific in its application that it was only of value in developing that exact image. And even then its advice was of the form ‘move this slider to here’ without any information on what charcaterristics of the image, at that point in the development, required that adjustment to that variable. I recall being so irritated by this lack of understanding of the needs of the viewer that I wrote a rather hotly worded note to the video creator, who was big enough to agree with me!
I would like this lesson to be applied in future material which supports darktable - a raw processor which I am slowly coming to realise is, functionally, within the top 5 or so such solutions in the marketplace - certainly capable of producing significantly better results, in my hands, than my previous chosen solution (Lightroom, from Beta 1 to version 6.14).
You make my point entirely: with this type of, supposedly educational, videos I gain almost zero transferable skills: they allow me only to be able to develop an identical image of the identical insect, taken in circumstances which are identical in every way (in terms of their light implications). In fact the whole video could be replaced by a preset. I gain no insights, no understanding of why do this, now, in this amount, in this area of the image.
As I said in my original post ,which sparked this discussion, a really valuable guide should include some discussion on what characteristics of an image require what sort of raw processing response.
And, yes, I appreciate that this is probably not suitable material to go into the ‘function’ driven architecture of the typical, well established user manual. And yes, I see it as quite a difficult guide to write, because it covers such a huge ‘battleground’. But those really insightful and gifted people, like Mr. Pierre et al., can look at an image and almost immediately see what needs to be done to it. Of course their brain has done in a few seconds what mine could do in a few weeks (possibly), so doesn’t that mean that they could at least describe the process they go through, the assessments they make, the options they consider and the criteria for selection of specific settings of variables?