about basecurves

the purpose of the basecurve is to make the otherwise scene-referred linear (linear raw rgb) color look good on your output devices. this is done independently of any color managed transforms which are also done in the pipeline, so we can establish a certain look independent of the devices. this will affect how highlights and shadows are balanced against each other, the overall contrast of the image, as well as color saturation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.darktable.org/2013/10/about-basecurves/
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I have my clone of darktable repository, but

$ cd tools/basecurve
$ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

the packages in the OBS now contain the basecurve tools as a subpackage:

you want the darktable-tools-basecurve package.

If your distribution/OS is not supported by the packages, the tools are not included in the normal build process and activated via

cmake -DBUILD_NOISE_TOOLS=ON -DBUILD_CURVE_TOOLS=ON
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Hi guys, where can I find a manual for measuring the basecurve using the newest version of Darkatable?

Base curve hasn’t changed and should be the we as above.

Hi,

I made it working using readme in the basecurve folder. However I got very strange curves in the end. Can you please check it and give advice?

Here are the gnuplot outputs: results · master · Boris B / darktable-scripts · GitLab
Here is the overal process of basecurve calculation: results/log.txt · master · Boris B / darktable-scripts · GitLab
Here is code: script.sh · master · Boris B / darktable-scripts · GitLab

I shot images the same way as here: https://youtu.be/LufwQZx01gk?t=448

Hi all,

I’m stuck in the same problem as Boris described. I tried to create the basecurve for a Nikon Coolpix P1000. I proceeded the same way (shoot photos as described in the video / use the helper script and darktable-curve-tool / print the PDF) and get a very strange curve as the result.

My goal was to provide the basecurve to the development community for the next release, but I’m totally stuck now.

Are there any ideas? Any hints are highly appreciated :slight_smile:

P.S.: working under WSL on Windows 10 (debian 10 testing, darktable sources used should be from 29th February)