Can I create a shortcut to do this?

Software darktable
1

Back from a bird photography trip with 2000+ shots to process, its time to speed up my workflow with good shortcuts, styles and presets.

I like to use some combination of 3 instances of the Diffuse or Sharpen module: first for the Demosaicing preset, a second for Local Contrast preset and a third for Lens Deblur preset applied to a suitably feathered mask that covers the bird.

Demosaicing applies to all images, so I include it in my main style. Local Contrast and Lens Deblur might or might not be good for an image, so currently I have another two styles set up, one for each of these. I look at the photo in darkroom; create a mask on the bird; then apply none, one or both of these styles. Obviously I have to create a new mask for each image, but the rest of the process involves a lot of mouse clicks which could potentially be automated.

Is there a way to create a single key shortcut which applies a style? or can the shortcut create a new instance of Diffuse or Sharpen together with a user defined preset? or is there a better way to speed up the workflow?

Thanks in advance!

2

The short answer is yes, and the long answer is here Working with modules from Lua scripts in darktable

3

The tricky bit is probably in applying the masks with a shortcut. I have no idea whether that’s even possible with a shortcut or Lua.

Setting up a shortcut to apply a preset in itself is easy enough, and well explained in the manual. For this particular case a style seems overkill, as each option involves one module.

4

I wonder if you had a dummy instance of exposure… You define your mask for each image there and then your style could be a raster mask reference… I wonder if that would carry through from image to image??

5

Actually the mask will be different for each image, so there isnt much to automate. In the best case, the same mask might work for 3 or 4 consecutive images, but birds move around a lot . . .

Following rvietor’s comment, I rolled my sleeves up and waded through the shortcut section of the manual again. By a process of trial and error, I managed to assign a hotkey to my home-rolled preset and it seems to work ok.

However, I will look again at the LUA suggestions, so many thanks to all.

6

Seems like you have covered this part of your request… the mask is a moving target though :slight_smile:

7

Another problem with the way I want my shortcut to work:

I want to end up with 3 instances of Diffuse or Sharpen. However, when I assign a shortcut to a key, it modifies the existing instance rather than creating a new one.

Is there a way to get a shortcut to create a new instance? Hovering over the text seems to suggest that right-click will create a new instance, but I can’t see how this works.

8

Perhaps styles may work better then. You can apply shortcuts to them, just like for module presets, and they actually add module instances (it looks like the module instances in a style stack on top of the history stack). One catch: I have no idea what happens if several styles add a module instance with the same name, but different settings or preset. Gut feeling is that previous instances with that name will be ignored, so best use descriptive names for your module instances.

More testing needed…

10

Shortcuts to styles seems to work fine, and is adding multiple instances of Blur or Sharpen when they have descriptive names.

11

I am following this post to learn from the answers of more experienced users. However, I have created numerous styles that I select from as my basic starting points. They include stuff like the diffuse or sharpen module for demosaicing sharpening, basic colorfullness preset from the color balance module, denoise profiled and choices between standard WB or WB using the color calibration module. Picture styles take the drudgery out of image processing and the individual modules that are applied can then be deactivated or tweaked if required.

I also process one image and then copy all the adjustments by using ctrl+shift+C and selecting all the parameters. I then open the next image in the series and using Crlt+V apply all the edits. This is a great method when having shot a series of similar images and avoids creating unnecessary styles.

Good luck with learning to speed up your processing. Dt is very quick when you get the workflow sorted.

12

Hi Terry,
There is indeed a lot of great material available from the old hands! I’ve been trying to pull it together into a document about sharpening for wildlife and bird photography, but there are so many good new modules and techniques that it is hard to keep up sometimes.

Anyway, in summary, my baseline style does pretty much what you do, plus I crop in by 33% as the bird is normally in the dead centre of the image. The preset exposure is at +1.5EV as this generally works for my shots (BTTR - bird to the right)

So the workflow is to select the next 100 images in lighttable, apply the baseline preset, and then review image by image, discarding the obvious duff shots. Usually I will have 4 or more shots of a particular bird, and I pick the best looking one to do some better development. Whatever I end up with, I CTRL-C copy to the other, similar shots, and CTRL-SHIFT-V to paste - this way the mask gets copied too.

I have a single key shortcut to hit the filmic eyedropper for white relative exposure which is a useful correction on its own, but also e+scroll is set to raise or lower exposure by 0.2EV if needed. As referred in another post, somehow I have set up e for exposure to pull up the widget-with-curvy-lines giving me fine exposure control, or the ability to just type " e 3 " to set exposure to +3EV (useful for completely silhouetted shots)

If the bird is in partial shadow, I use tone equaliser to dodge/burn appropriately.
If the bird is in total darkness/silhouette, I find the “local contrast” HDR preset very useful to get a lot of detail on the bird - at a big cost to image quality.

After this, I have the blur or sharpen presets for Lens Deblur and Local Contrast on a single shortcut key, and I now prefer the “subtler” sharpening/clarity they give compared to old “local contrast” and old sharpen module. There is undoubtedly a big processing cost to this step, but with a good GPU card its pretty quick. I have set up the iterations for Local contrast to 32 which takes about 4 secs on ave and retrieves a lot of image quality, normally.

Of course if the photo is really good quality, there are lots of other tweaks available. . .

Once again a big, big thankyou to the dev team for making all this doable!!

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13

@Aliks are you referring to doing this in the diffuse or sharpen module. I am still doing local contrast adjustments with the local contrast module. Am I missing out on something by not switching to diffuse or sharpen module to do local contrast? Why so many iterations? Thanks.

14

Yes, I have pretty much moved over to D&S for local contrast.

Its worth comparing the effect of D&S versus “old” local contrast with your own eyes. You should see D&S giving a more subtle effect, that is more pronounced as the iterations are increased. I guess its a matter of preference, and the type of image you are working with, but I think D&S is giving good quality contrast, without the “harshness”. Increasing the number of iterations allows fine grained control of the amount of contrast.

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