ART blows me away...

Software ART
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So, by chance I stumbled into ART, again. While it has been for some time on my disc, I probably didnt’ use it since , err, last year :wink: - I mean, “I didn’t use it for a while”. My main editor has been DT for the last year.

I was tempted to give ART a second try, because it fits me style of editing very good. For the bulk of my pictures I do a quick edit, using only the tone equalizer, tone curve and a saturation curve (which is more prominent in ART than in DT and I like that very much).
So I took a bunch of edits from darktable, which I had invested a good amount of time into, as a baseline.

And I have to admit, the quality of the renderings in ART just blew me away. It’s absolutly stunning, what ART produces with a streamlined editing process.

Here are three comparisons. All are 1:1 crops to show the difference. Left is my original DT rendition and on the right is the ART rendition.

For the first picture I subsequently tried really really hard to mimic the clean look in DT (tried many variants of DoS, contrast eq, denoise, surface blur, astro denoise, sharpen, local contrast - with and w/o masks), but I failed. Here is not my final try, but the first edit I took as a baseline.

grafik
grafik1679×832 540 KB

Next one shows the really clean rendition of the fine hairs.

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grafik1528×718 319 KB

And last is a closeup of an eye. You can see the fine color spectrum which art renders.

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grafik2095×845 473 KB

yeah

I do realize, this is somewhat a confession of my incompetence regarding darktable. But I have been learning the DT intensivly for over a year and I think I know my ways around quite good. Especially for the first picture I really believe, you I can’t reproduce this look in DT.

So, what do I wan’t to say with this topic? Firstly a big thank you to @agriggio for developing ART and providing such a fine piece of software.

And also, more importantly, an even bigger thanks to all FOSS developers, providing such a rich spectrum of photo editing software to choose from.
THANK YOU.

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Try the hdr preset of local contrast in DT if you are looking to bump details/contrast … you will have to dial it back most likely but it really pulls things up and even seems to help manage DNR a bit…

I also dabble with ART… are you saying that you only used the exposure tab basically or did you use other modules as well?? DT ones look a bit less saturated and a bit cooler… Just random observations… I often felt I could easily deal with color and saturation in ART but I never was able to really control sharpness and often I got lots of artifacts as well so I would be curious to know if you just did tone and color or you also did a bit more to your images…

The new scripts in the local adjustments tools are quite powerful and really provide even more control in ART…

One other think I would check is the rendering intent if you are looking at exported jpg files… I think and I might be wrong that ART might default to relative rendering which in most cases I prefer but DT does perceptual and the DT default profile has no table to do rendering intents so you would need to swap it out… I use an ICC file from color.org… before that I found at first I was adding some black compensation in exposure and then later using the waveform just dropping the black using the global offset as that was recommended… Using either one of these immediately improved my rendered jpgs making the color and contrast more like I had on the screen… The perceptual render was much better for some images but overall most times I like the bolder image of the relative render… I am only going by what shows in the ART color settings but @agriggio Alberto might be able to confirm if the jpgs use relative rendering…

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115 posts were split to a new topic: Settings for fine details (compared to other tools)

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That’s been exactly my experience. darktable can walk and talk in the right hands, no doubt, but apparently they’re not my hands. :grin: For my workflow, I’ve been pleased with what I can do with ART. Choice is good, all the way around.

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While we are on the topic of the great ART, Alberto, I see a little typo in documentation:

…where your colors becomes unrealistic.

(agriggio / ART / wiki / Reference — Bitbucket)

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Thanks! Fixed now

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Wow, that’s the super speed! :slight_smile:

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Alberto, looks like a missing HTML closing tag for italic on the same page starting with text:

Operations in the Lab *(Luminosity, a: green-magenta and b: blue-yellow) …

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@agriggio Another one, probably bullets points are messed up:

An area mask can be drawn as a gradient, polygon or rectangular shape then modified for feathering and blur. - Feathering - Blends the edges of the mask in response to the tonal characteristics of the underlying image - Blur - Applies a Gaussian blur to the mask - Contrast curve - Modifies the mask with one of four curve types if desired

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Thanks! I’ll fix them as soon as I have the chance

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