Crush and lift the blacks

Software darktable
1

Hi,

I’m trying to crush and then lift the blacks in a image (see attached example) in darktable, that is, remove most of the details in the shadows and then lighten them so they are no longer pure black. I’ve tried to do this with the tone curve tool but I end up with weird artifacts in the shadow areas.

blackwhite
blackwhite1024×640 231 KB

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

2

Good evening @bipster,

Spontaneously, I would say the Color balance module.

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

1 Like
3

Do you have any similar image in raw so I can try some things out and see if I can get close to that result?

4

Never mind, I’ve found the jpg with a watermark so I think I can share it freely?

Basically all I did to achieve this look is lifted the shadows with RGB curve and droped the exposure by 3 EV in the background which I masked to isolate the background.
Obviously if it was a nice jpg or if it was a raw image I could have done much more but here it is:
Before:
1
After:
1

EDIT: Oh, yeah! I forgot to say, I also used monochrome module :see_no_evil:

3 Likes
5

Thank you both! :smiley:

1 Like