Two pictures are here - one from darktable and one from the sony imaging edge software. the sony imaging picture has “low” as part of its name.
The picture was taken in raw from a sony a9.
I’ve tried everything that i can think of (which isn’t much) to get the shorts and gloves of the player in the darktable picture to look blue like in the sony picture (which is how it should be). tried changing white balance, increase saturation, and dipped my toe into color zones to change just the color of the shorts and glove (something i’d prefer not to have to do b/c it wouldn’t be feasible for editing a lot of pictures).
i couldn’t get anything to work. the pants and gloves always look like a black.
any suggestions?
All files are licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike.
thanks
Are you able to attach the RAW file please ? And add a licence.
I would like to attempt this challenge but I need to go out now and I think others will be asking for the RAW too.
It’s a matter of how you manage the exposure. The pants and gloves are blue even in your posted darktable-JPEG, just to dark.
I have this problem usually. The culprit can be filmic rgb. Maybe too much contrast or maybe you need more room for the shadows.
@7osema - it was the filmic rgb! i had no idea. even when i just turned it off i got the blues back.
thanks so much. i still might post the raw here to see if anyone wants to try it out. i find indoor hockey so tough to get the colors/white balance right that i could use some hints.
thanks
I would also still like to see the raw. Also, in case I missed it, or it wasn’t mentioned, what version of darktable (and filmic) is this? Anything adjusted? Preservation settings changed?
I agree with above, it looks like much of the blue is just getting clipped as black.
Here’s the raw file.
DSC08354 - Copy.ARW (24.0 MB)
I’m using Darktable 4.0.0
I have made adjustments to the image to get it to the jpeg that’s above. Both on Sony and Darktable.
As mentioned above, filmic RGB was the culprit.
Nevertheless, still looking forward to seeing how other people attack a file like this. As I shoot hundreds of shots at a game, anything that makes editing quicker will be most helpful!
All files are licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike.
Thanks
Nice shot!
Disregarding whether the colors are true or not — one can
play with different crops as well…
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
To be honest, I don’t really get the issue with the blue of the player. A white-balance adjustment is needed (but you seem to be doing that as well).
If I raise exposure high enough, then enable filmic and hit the auto button on the scene tab it basically just sets itself nicely. If you don’t dare to set exposure high enough, then filmic will think it’s all shadows and make them too dark. You could raise it again with the tone equalizer, but just setting exposure high enough is often enough.
(Sometimes after hitting the ‘auto tune levels’ in filmic, I double-click the black slider to reset it to defaults, just to see how that looks.
But in this image… just raising exposure to 2.649 (and you shot at -1 and that’s compensated, so a total of 3.649ev exposure boost) and then enabling filmic with ‘auto tune levels’ in modern defaults will get you there. Add things like ‘color balance rgb - vivid colors’ and/or ‘local contrast’ to taste if you want, enable ‘fixers’ (chromatic aberrations / lens profile / denoise / sharpen). I don’t even know if there were chromatic aberrations, I just enable it by default on a Sony with shiny stuff in the frame.
DSC08354 - Copy.ARW.xmp (14.7 KB)
Opened it in my hack raw processor to confirm the black level was okay, and it is. It appears the darktable filmic toe is crushing those dark blues. I don’t have the fancy dt filmic, but I was able to shape my grade-school filmic to make them a bit of blue:
The maize color looks dull in some images, but still better than spartan green.
lol. very funny! and i agree.
Thanks for the input here! Really helpful.
I did what you suggested on a few other photos from that game and it works out well. Simple and pretty quick.
I’m not sure what you meant though by ‘color balance rgb - vivid colors’. I did go into color balance rgb and changed the global variance and global contrast under master but didn’t find anything that said “vivid colors”. Unless you were just saying to change the colors in that to “vivid”.
Prior to Darktable, what I had been doing before with my photos was using digikam as the database and also to cull the photos after import. Then I used the Capture One free for sony to adjust those that I liked. While it works, I’m not overly happy with Capture one (probably my inability as an editor more than the program) but it is definitely pretty slow as a program.
Lightroom is good at all this but I’ve been trying to avoid it and check out alternatives.
If I can get darktable to be quick and easy, that would be a huge help.
Thanks!!
And Thanks to all those who added their versions!
Its a preset…
Not saying you have to do what I did, I was just explaining what I did.
What I mean is the ‘color balance rgb’ ‘vivid colors’ preset. And now that I’m making a screenshot, I discover that it’s actually called ‘vibrant colors’, sorry:
(and completely off-topic, but Capture One has always been one of the fastest / most responsive RAW programs I have experienced. It just seems good for a certain look, and I run into issues when I try something that’s too far away from it. Also, I have more than just a Sony camera, and I always thought Capture One was too expensive for me, as a non-pro amateur hobby kinda photographer).
DSC08354 - Copy.ARW.xmp (12.1 KB)
Thanks @jorismak. After Todd’s response I was able to figure it out.
Your previous post helped quite a bit. I’ll also add that I go into color calibration and click on the eye dropper and I find that makes the whites really nice.
Regarding your comment on Capture One, I find that simply importing my photos after a game (perhaps 1000 or so) takes approximately 30 minutes. And that’s from the hard drive after I’ve already copied them off of the SD card. That is really slow. Digikam does it in about 5 minutes, and Lightroom (when I used it) would be in one minute or so. I guess I really wasn’t commenting on the responsiveness of editing each photo - I should have made that clear.
One other question here. I’d like to edit one photo and alter the exposure, the filmic rgb, and color calibration, and use the preset, and then copy those settings and paste to another photo. However, I’m not sure if the filmic rgb or color calibration (eye dropper) will be reading off of the new photo or simply just taking the results of the first photo. I’d prefer the former. If it’s not doing that, is there a way to accomplish it so that I can copy but still have it adjust to the new photo?
Thanks!!
Thanks Claes for the compliment!
I like your crop more than mine. It turns it into a much better picture!
Like you said the colors are not what I was looking for but the crop is excellent.