I disagree: sharpness is one attribute of a photograph that can be varied depending on what the photographer is trying to evoke. Also this is a film emulation preset, so sharpness likely doesn’t have much to do with the effect. You can also try the preset on your own photograph.
I definitely found the video educational. And it’s just cool to see on-the-fly decisions that build up to the final result!
It is not the lack of sharpness (per se) that disturbs me. However it does prevent me from discerning the film emulation effect which was, presumably, the object of the lesson. Note that I am referring here to the video.
Hey there, first of all thanks for the feedback, it helps a lot not being a lone wolf in this world of photo madness 
So let’s try and make sense of this.
@paperdigits: it is not necessarily a film emulation attempt 
though I am flattered you think it could pass for one. The video is meant to be an intro to what it feels like and looks like to use RT and the various features of it. I do like filmy looks though and try to create similar feels in my edits.
@mikesan: I understand your frustration and it would indeed be a photograph worthy of the garbage bin had I not intended to give it an out-of-focus, near-bokeh-shot feel. A bit of a background story: this year I visited my hometown in Romania (where I was born and spent the first 16 years of my life), and it was the building on the right where my grandmother’s apartment used to be, so consequently I spent many childhood days walking that street. I took the photograph this way because I wanted to go for a slightly-dreamy look and feel to it, sort of like a depiction of the fact that the angle here is more or less the depiction I have of that place in my memory of back then. The additional sharpening I applied using the tone mapping tool was in order to bring out the out-of-focus light circles, which I do enjoy dearly.
I have a lot of friends who just don’t get the point of the bokeh-shots, and some of them get literal headaches from their eyes trying to force-adjust the view and bring it into focus. But the shot was most certainly meant this way.
Thanks again folks for the feedback. It’s very welcomed!
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Thanks man! Always feels good being appreciated. I’m in the making of an actual tutorial with voice-over on the topic of building a multi-layer panorama in Hugin where the initial edit is done in RT and perhaps an HDR merge of multiple exposures of the same panorama.
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This is only about your video format compatibility:
On Windows 7, neither Cyberfox nor ordinary Firefox can play the video on your web page (for me, that means). Vivaldi works as expected. The downloaded ogv file plays in VLC and SMPlayer, but MPC-HC only plays audio. The MediaInfo tool doesn’t recognize the format.
On an Ubuntu Studio 16.04/64 virtual machine, Firefox also can’t play the video, and the default Parole Media Player 0.8.1 can’t play the ogv (Could not initialise Xv output). VLC can, again.
Since Firefox can play many ogv videos properly, perhaps you could tweak some format settings, to make it more compatible.
If it is not only me, having problems.
Be well!
(edit: typo)
Yeah I know 
the format issue is definitely a real one. I’m not very experienced with formats and compatibility, but am working on it. For now I’ll make sure to provide direct links to download the videos in case they don’t read well.
Maybe @patdavid might have an idea what format to use to be as supported as possible.
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Here is my RawTherapee attempt with my preset for bolder colors.
I think the photo is fine for a film emulation preset, especially since it is a typical scene and it also contains good dynamic range to showcase the effects of emulation on highlight/shadow areas.
Perhaps my biggest gripe with presets (don’t get me wrong, I’m also in the process of developing a preset, but only for the Nexus 5) is that it rarely works well when applied to different camera/sensors than it was developed on. Usually it is faster to develop your own from scratch that is tailored for your camera if you want a preset that you can sort of “apply and get 90% of the work done”. I mostly study those presets along with the RAW image to see how they achieve certain effects, but not to copy the actual numbers.
With these said, I’m looking forward to your future videos with commentary since your results surely look nice!
@stefan.chirila Your video seems to be VP8 in Ogg container, which strikes me as an odd combination. Perhaps try VP8 in WebM or Theora in Ogg?
@PkmX: Yeah I hear you! I think when it comes to film presets, they really help us get why back in the day there was such a crazy competition between brands, way worse than Nikon versus Canon today. Thing is I think that a lot like actual films, the film presets can be made to really make the best out of a certain situation and others like it, whereas it’s not easy if even possible to make one that works great for just about any lighting situation. I also like the idea to make “the Stefan preset” that I can slap on to all of my pictures and it just work, but I haven’t gotten there and I don’t think I will. Variety is good
As for the picture being a good testing candidate, honestly I didn’t put too much thought into it. I was working on it at the time of posting and thought it’ll bring the point of the video across. Now that I think of it, you’re right, it does have varying dynamic range, the only think missing, I guess, would be a face, to see what a given preset does to portraits. Oh well …I never intended it to be a perfect shot anyway
about your edit: did you apply any highlights recovery? the orange sunlight center top looks like it could use a little
ND7_8484.NEF.pp3 (9.7 KB)
It uses the Kodak Portra 400 NC 1 - HaldCLUT from @patdavid’s film emulation preset and Rec2020-elle-V4-g10.icc as the input profile which you can download from here. You need to point them to the correct path for the pp3 to work.
For highlight recovery, I used the default values from “auto levels” which sets the highlight compression to 100 with method blend. The result already looks good so I didn’t change anything in the exposure tool beyond that.
As for the orange sunlight, yes I really like that effect. I stole the CC/CL curve trick from @Morgan_Hardwood here and then applied it in reverse: lowering the CL curve to desaturate the image while bumping the CC curve up to compensate. It is one of those little accidental discoveries that does wonders to a photo.
Edit: I figured that I misinterpreted your sentence. I don’t think there are many details that could be salvaged there and I do prefer having that area blown out with a orangish tint which makes the bokeh looks better IMO.
Yep. If you’re ok with it, a good option is to offload video heavy lifting to something like YouTube. Otherwise, the best option is a few different formats to cover the bases, with h264 being the most widely supported. I’d do that + webm to cover most users and supply both in an html5 video element.
This all assumes you’re not going to use DASH adaptive steaming. Which is a different fun can of worms. 
I’ll post some options for getting these files easily with ffmpeg later this week and run a few tests. Thanks for making it available! Any chance you could license it freely? Maybe cc-by-sa?
You should also be able to use handbrake, which offers a bunch of output presets.
Hey guys, so after many many failed attempts, I believe I partially tamed the monster. I posted the new tutorial on the blog: How to stitch a panorama with HUGIN and RAWTHERAPEE – screencast tutorial | Stefan Chirila | fine art portrait and wedding photography
RAW files and preset available. Enjoy, but do say thank you by sharing your opinion.
Here’s what happened, I was planning on having music in the background of my narrating and when I finished the video I realised I was so nervous I forgot to turn the music player on …doh! So I exported the sound of the video using Audacity as a FLAC and imported it into Ardour and mixed it in with the music I wanted. Then I exported as an ogg, removed the sound completely from the video and added the new sound to the video.
For those who care:
#remove sound
ffmpeg -i [input_file] -vcodec copy -an [output_file]
#with reencode
ffmpeg -i example.mkv -c copy -an example-nosound.mkv
add sound
ffmpeg -i video.avi -i audio.mp3 -codec copy -shortest output.avi
#with reencode
ffmpeg -i video.avi -i audio.mp3 -c:v libx264 -c:a libvorbis -shortest output.mkv
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Will definitely check it out!
I just want to chime in and say thank you for this thread and the mention of Fuji 400H look! I’ve been looking for a long time for a color treatment that I’d like, I’ve tried all the variations of Kodakchrome and the like, but was never satisfied. So thanks @stefan.chirila for this mention of 400H and your tribute to it. I now use it daily thanks to the darktable styles of @t3mujin (thanks to him as well!).
Pixls.us is definitely a very good source of inspiration and tools.
Denis
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It’s only as good as the community members that it’s made of.
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I hear you! I’m dying to eventually know what elements give the 400H the illusive awesomeness it undoubtedly has!
Well, @patdavid , sure. But you did set up an amazing platform so that those members can get together and have a good time. That is invaluable.
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Progress is slow. But new presets almost there. Carpathica has a box
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