Step two of this new module was just merged to master!
I would love if you tried it out on gentle edits as well as pushing it to its limits. Maybe find a bug or two in the process! And after you tried it on a few images and got a feel for it come back here in this fresh new thread and report your feelings and findings.
There is still time left until the release date and I want to get a proper round of testing and feedback before making another round of changes based on what you write here. My intention is to summarize the feedback a few weeks from now and create a couple of polls to get a feel what you think is most important.
On the top is a scene-referred version of the highlights and shadows / tone equalizer module with size control as well as preview of the size of the filter.
The local contrast section exposes three bands of details. Coarse details start at ābase detail levelā. Fine details starts at the finest possible level (2 px). They then meet at the center where medium details has its peak intensity. There is again preview buttons available to understand what will be changed using that slider.
The filter settings allow for adjusting stricter halo control at the expense of missing some details or allowing more halos for extracting more textures. The noise bias is there calm the darker part the image which otherwise can cause really bad problems in a log based editing like this. It is easiest to adjust while previewing the āfine detailsā.
Thanks, Iāll try it out! Backwards compatible with the older version edits? Just asking, I know this is still in developing phase, and this is not required. But still wanna know.
Thanks @jandren! You already know Iām a big fan of the module from the other thread. Iāve been playing with it quite a bit over the last couple of days, and it is working very well for me. Unfortunately, I canāt test your most recent builds because master contains a bug preventing Darktable from loading on Windows. If a build can be made that avoids that bug, I can try the newest features.
Right now, Iām very satisfied with the module, and it would claim its place in my workflow, and in fact be a central part of it.
The only thing I would like to see is the ability to independently tweak the detail level for the 3 contrast sliders. As Iāve mentioned before, I might want to use a lower base detail level to target very coarse details but then have a higher base detail level for fine details. The solution right now is to use multiple instances, but this can really clutter up the module list in some situations.
Okay Iāve just started testing 5.7.0+983~g0c10133fc4 from your repo. Seeing a strange thing with the fine details preview in combination with the base detail level slider.
Move the base details slider smoothly either way while fine details preview is on. The detail size seems to be going the other way, then making a large step forward. Happens more often when halo control is higher.
Also making a note that now halo control is back to ānegative=more contrast additionā but it works the other way for the shadows and highlights sliders. Negative halo control makes the shadows/highlights have less effect (I assume this is how itās supposed to work).
Just another playraw test: Two instances, first to compress large scale shadows/highlights, increase coarse detail and lower leaf detail. Second to boost small scale shadows/highlights. Then saturation and Sigmoid only.
@jandren Thank you so much for your work on this. I really love C&T (but not the ā&ā in the title ), and it quickly became my go-to tool for dialing in (or out) depth and sharpness.
Unfortunately I did not have a lot of free cycles to follow development more closely, so I did not really understand how shadows/highlights fit in the equation. I thought they would be used to amplify or tune down contrast in specific tonal ranges (like an exposure mask, but maybe independent of absolute exposure values, or with a different algo), but now I understand that they are actually just a scene-referred reimplementation of shadows and highlights. If this is the case, I would have rather had a separate module for that.
If it is a replacement of the shadow and highlights I would like a separate module. In the examples shown it seems tamer than the shadow and highlights module, but I am still waiting to test it myself.
In Step 2 with high base detail level (e.g. 8,7) the preview for medium and fine details is solid grey. When zooming to 100% there is lots of detail that should be visible in lower zoom levels.
Is it just me or is V2 more prone to harsher local contrast effects? I find myself reaching for halo control much more often to soften the effect. Not a critique, just curious.
And @Simone_M, absolutely fine to wonder about! Its trying to be backwards compatible so things like detail level, noise bias, and edge protection are migrated properly. The multisscale processing is however better at extracting details in areas darker than its surrounding which means that these areas will have more effect applied than before. There might also be a dependency on the used detail level which in the new is split into multiple band pass levels in the background.
Pascal also noted this over at Github after the merge so I will make a attempt at a better approximation. You could help me out by trying migrating a few images and report back how much you had to adjust them after the fact.
I have taken this for a test run on a number of images.
For me it will replace both contrast equaliser and local contrast in most use cases. What I really like is that you have control over the contrast scale but you can also use the shadows and highlights control to dial down the effect if it overcooks them so you can effectively target the mid range. For this reason I really like having the shadows and highlights there in the same module even if it seems odd at first.
I will still continue to use tone equaliser because it gives a quick way of adjusting many tonal ranges quickly and easily.
Great work many thanks.
After using Step 2 for a while I feel somewhat ashamed to say I miss Step 1. I hesitated to even write this as I do not want to belittle @jandren 's effort but maybe there it is something to be learned anyway:
Step 1 feels simpler and more surgical: Dial in an amount, play with the scale to find the correct scale and youāre done
I remember having the same experience back when the original concept was shared and then refined by Christian. The first proof of concept felt like a scalpel - simple and powerful. The later iterations turned into a complicated machine.
Also the local contrast from Step 2 somehow feels harsher. I have to be much more careful because when pushing the amount-sliders a bit the image quickly feels busy and local contrasts quickly begin to feel overcooked.
I wonder whether this is because of the bandpass approach: In Step 1, as more scales were affected evenly, it feels like everything blended together more nicely.
I donāt actually know what to gather from my writeup to go foward :-/ but maybe you guys have some ideas .
), and it quickly became my go-to tool for dialing in (or out) depth and sharpness.
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