Creating Cinematic Look in Darktable

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 :wink:
I basically followed the video as far as possible.

  • Used the auto wb in color calibration to set a cooler overall feel.
  • Set exposure a bit lower
  • Added some gentle diffusion using diffuse or sharpen. (trying to emulate 'negative clarity" in Lr)
  • Used two instances of rgb curves, one for tone and one for colour. These I moved above the tonemapper (sigmoid) as I suspect that’s how the Lr pipeline works. Not sure. Also not sure what settings in rgb curves are closest the Lr curves. I used preserve colors = none on the instance used for tones/contrast and compensate middle grey ticked on both. Anyway, then followed the adjustments in the video, more or less.
  • Then moved to color balance rgb, the 4 ways tab is a close match for the Lr color grading tool.
  • There was a few tweaks to overall exposure and contrast/saturation in color balance rgb along the way - I was kind of feeling my way to a large extent.

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.

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