Bee macro -- always having trouble with colors in darktable, especially macros (sony a6400)

Cool, so I gave things another quick go and attempted to get at least “not worse than ooc jpg” colors, even if the ooc jpg tastes for contrast/saturation differ and I’m not sure how to feel about them yet. I just checked the color balance rgb doc and saw " This module is not suitable for beginners with no prior knowledge of color theory, who might want to stick to the global chroma and global vibrance settings until they have a good understanding of the dimensions of color." and maybe this is where I keep getting stuck or into very weird colors. I had seen a bunch of tutorials basically stating to manage: white balance, the exposure, and then global vibrance/global chroma, then go into filmic. In this quick attempt, I tried using the 4-way tab without any understanding and at least it didn’t make things markedly worse or anything. I also applied tone masks to the leg/eye highlights to knock down the brightness a tiny bit while raising the exposure elsewhere.

I understand near 0 about color and the editing process, but I changed the workflow to sigmoid from filmic as suggested above for this one. I know my biggest hurdle may be how little I know, but It’s been a struggle for me to remember alllllll the pieces of information I’m trying to learn when a lot of it isn’t sticking quite yet, or I don’t understand.

One with haze removal attached, one without. Maybe it’s a bad idea for a module to use here, but sometimes I noticed the haze removal was pleasant at certain depths on the macros I’ve made, and sometimes making them look fake or weird.

I definitely prefer some of the thoughtfully done color renditions above, so I will hopefully try again after reading and looking at what y’all did.



MJD04337.ARW.xmp (20.0 KB)

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