The Contrast in Tone Curves slider is fantastic and makes working with ART so pleasant.
If I have managed the tone values of an image with large light-dark differences well with Tone Equalizer or with Log Tone Mapping, I often need more contrast again. With all the contrast controls I know so far, the darks get even darker and the brights lighter, so it takes away a lot of my previous efforts. Not so the Contrast slider in Tone Curves.
Here, of course, the dark becomes even darker, but the light is changed only slightly and the white not at all - thank goodness. This is an enormous help for me.
I don’t know how this tool works, but I’m very glad that ART makes it possible.
In the current master version, there’s even a new “Base curve” menu which allows to protect more the highlights (“Smooth highlights rolloff”) or both the darks and highlights (“Smooth S-shaped”).
The new menu will show up under the “Mode” menu.
To get the current master, you have to compile ART yourself, or see if someone produces “nightly” builds for your operating system. Or you will have to wait for the next release by Alberto.
Darktable has many options to adjust contrast without simply turning the shadows black and the highlights white. But darktable is a very different beast to ART. Which is better depends on you. A lot of work is being put into ART to make it a very user friendly experience so enjoy the learning.
Nope just set the fulcrum in RGB CB in DT and you can basically end up with a similar effect…
Most people don’t bother to set the mask in that module or or adjust the white and fulcrum sliders… this is actually important to control the effects of the module
I just set the fulcrum high and it seemed to move the histogram in a similar way to what I saw in ART and gave a similar outcome… N of 1 but seems like a good way to bias it
