Dear all,
I am new to darktable and the videos of Boris help a lot. Thank you for the effort you put into that.
Most Pro Photographers use Lightroom and a cinematic color grading is very popular.
Examples are:
Could you give advice in how best to achieve such a look in darktable?
Thank you in advance.
What do you mean by cinematic colour grading?
Normally, you first get your image colour corrected (whitebalancing, and correction of possibly other colour casts); then I would use color balance RGB to modify the colours to taste. Perhaps the new primaries module could help here as well?
the easy way to get most of the way there is to use film emulation LUTs - of which there are thousands available on the internet - via the lut3D module. Very handy.
if you want to get your hands dirty, some combination of rgb curves, color balance rgb, and color zones can get you there. Most “film looks” revolve around tinting the highlights and/or shadows warm or cool and shifting (and occasionally compressing) certain hues.
You can find an example style for Cineatic Color Tone in darktable here:
However, that thread is more than 6 years old, and now with the availability of several new color related modules, it should rather be seen as an example of end result that can be obtained, rather than the optimal method for getting there.
This thread may be of interst to you:
as well as Pat Davids posting here (although primarily adressing RT):
Look also into this discussion on Luts and Cinematic color (in RT forum):
Also this page on Cinematic colors in general:
Hi @DaFu,
Monaris did a tutorial on how she edits here pictures. Of course, in Lightroom. So your challenge is to find the corresponding modules in darktable to follow along.
Some of the photos I like, but often “cinematic look” for me just is dark and has an ugly tint 
.
@DaFu , maybe you could provide a raw file and link to one of Monaris images with a look you would like to achive. Then we could make a playraw from it.
Wow. Just here to say that photographs from Billy Dinh are exceptional. Such a great find. Thanks.
I’m not too sure that a ‘cinematic’ colour grading is really a thing… I think there’s quite a few different styles within that. Tagging @s7habo - I’m sure Boris will know 
how to reproduce some of the styles in the links you shared. Some amazing photos in there for sure!
I’m having a look at the video - when I have time I’ll try and list the darktable equivalents. Or similar equivalents…
So I haven’t tried it at this point, but to jump to the colour grading part of her video, you should be able to follow pretty exactly in darktable. color calibation for white balance, rgb curves, then color balance rgb.
Obviously things may respond differently, but different images will be different to some extent anyway…
I will have a go at it later. 
I found it a bit hard to find a similar kind of image to the Monaris video, but this one seems to do…
I make no claim to be good at this kind of thing, so use at your own risk
I basically followed the video as far as possible.
I’ve packaged it into a style as well so you can load it easily on any image - if you want to!
Monaris-like style attempt.dtstyle (4.5 KB)
DSC_4318.NEF (19.6 MB)
DSC_4318_01.NEF.xmp (9.7 KB)
Licenced https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
P.S. By the way, I think one can do most of the curves stuff in another instance of color balance rgb - at least in theory.
I tried the style on a few other images - no other changes except for exposure and wb in color calibration to suit the scene.
The analogue film look as in photos of Monaris is a widespread look that is relatively easy to achieve.
The most important two elements are:
To take Steven’s example photo, you always start with white balance:
You can then use a contrast equalizer to calm down the texture:
This means you lose a little of the global contrasts, which can be enhanced again with the color balance module. For example, in this case with global offset and highlights gain:
Now you can turn your attention to colour grading. For teal and orange, one instance of the rgb primaries module is sufficient. I will first move it over the tone-mapper (Sigmoid in this case) because I want to avoid “distorting” the colour settings in Sigmoid. I’m practically working on a fully formed photo whose colour mood I want to change additionally.
Now I move the blue primary in the direction of cyan, which also shifts red in the direction of magenta. This also makes the yellow tones a little more orange. And that is more or less the basis for teal and orange:
Now it’s all about creating the greenish-bluish colour mood that Monaris’ photos have. So the entire colour composition must be shifted in this direction.
Accordingly, we select a colour with hue tint slider and move the white point in that direction using the tint purity slider:
You can refine it and adapt it to motifs. In this case, I could make the shadows a little bit more bluish to create an even colder impression and so on:
Thanks Boris! Looks good. I might just add that in the text, you call the second step the tone equalizer which (in english) is a different tool - looks like you mean the contrast equalizer.
Just mention for anyone who could be confused. I’m impressed with the new primaries module. Very versatile!
Yes, that was indeed the mistake. I have corrected the post. Thanks for pointing it out! 
A LUT would certainly be quicker initially. That one’s a bit too ‘crispy’ for my taste although obviously it could be backed off a bit.
Would work well in it’s own right though.
Thanks for the tutorial!
Thank you for the hints Boris,
When trying to reproduce your example, in the shadows appear
very bright pixels what is happening here and how to prevent this?
I don’t know. Try switching off individual modules to see which one is causing it.
These could also be hot pixels. For this darktable has an extra module called hot pixel.
https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/hot-pixels/
