I am using dt v. 4.6.1 on a mac (intel), and when I toggle the color assessment (white border) in the darkroom, the image is quite small, leaving a lot of unused space (see attached screenshot). Is there a way to make the image fill the available space?
Its sort of like that by design so that you have white and middle grey reference borders and zoomed out images are easier to assess exposure overall… Aurelien walks through using this in an older video when he introduced it… so in your example you are under exposed and would bring things up until your white siding was close to white and or to set middle grey…It gets a little bigger frame on my PC if you scroll to zoom in… otherwise I think its fixed…
As @priort says, this is for assessment of colours and overall contrast/brightness so is designed to give you large areas of grey/white as reference. You can change it if you want, but IMO this is a reasonable size and I don’t use it for the whole time while editing.
Thank you for your reply. I understand the reasoning behind having both the gray and the white border. It is just that in my case (and it wasn’t this way before) the gray surroundings are just too big (see the screenshot attached in my previous mail).
The border ratio settings are in the config file… Did you tweak these…
Basically in this mode you really aren’t expected to see much in the image at all but the global tone and there was a fair bit of discussion but the nice broad bands for grey and white as I said with the zoomed out image let you dial that in…
You could likely also achieve something more to your liking using the framing module or maybe not but it might be an option
I wonder if it’s related to your resolution… or possibly being on a Mac?
It looks like your screen is 1380 × 862 (according to the screenshot). In your screenshot and mine, our headers (with the logo) look to be the same size, so I think that’s your 1:1 resolution (unless you have some titlebars or taskbars or something like that… but it wouldn’t account for much).
In other words, I think this is probably a bug (due to us getting wildly different results with defaults) and should be filed. Meanwhile, hopefully it can be worked around by editing the sizes.
Hello, it may have in fact to do with the resolution. The screen resolution is 2560 x 1600 and the iso12464 border size and ratio in darktablerc are set at their default values (4 and 0.4, respectively).
The interesting thing is that when I connect the laptop to an external monitor, which has a lower resolution, the paddings (both white and grey) shrink to much more reasonable sizes.
Yes so change the one above it… that is the global size for both then the ratio specifies how much of that will be white…Try a very small value for the border…
A really easy solution is to use the framing module. Maybe the default will work fine or just make a preset. This option is just as easy to use as the intended color assessment mode and no need to fiddle with the code.
@priort ,thank you very much, that worked! It seems, however, that the border thickness changes quite a bit when I switch from the laptop monitor to an external one. Shouldn’t these settings be approximately (if not exactly) independent of screen resolution?
Maybe it’s also a matter of the scaling factor in your display config.
In my case I get similar results if I use a fractional scaling factor of 150%, which is just about right for my 14" 4K laptop screen resolution.
I’m using the default settings:
Its funny though the lower version is more of how the feature was explained by Aurelien originally ie to zoom out considerably and then evaluate the image for white and middle grey as that would give a better general overall assessment…
Yes you will see artefacts at smaller sizes because darktable processes the downscaled view, but colour assessment mode is just about properly assessing colour/brightness/contrast and isn’t really meant to be used for assessing other image characteristics.
Getting off topic here: I see halos better even if the image is scaled after exporting, or viewed on a higher resolution or smaller screen (e.g. phone vs 27 inch display), even if no pixel level scanning is involved (e.g. image is viewed at 1:1 size).