Apologies. I had opened the the tab from the earlier link but was distracted before viewing it 
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Well, here comes the craftmanship then…
Coming soon, darktable 4.0, now with “SI” (sentient intelligence), leaving AI in the dust!
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Aurélien
Craftmanship is king 
The coulor pickers (white and black) do the job about half the time, with the pictures I’ve tried so far. I seem to have a better starting point with the auto tune levels.
Play with filmic.
Then Color Balance and the Contrast equalizer.
Mostly at the end a slight s-curve. As someone stated here above : is it better to do this in Tone Curve or in RGB Curve ?
I presume you would advise not to use any curve, but sometimes for me it’s the best thing to have that last bit of punch to make the edit the way I want it to be.
Thanks in advance.
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@anon41087856 Aurelien, why did you use Local Contrast here instead of the clarity preset in Contrast Equalizer (maybe softened with a 50% opacity)? I seem to remember that LC was somehow discouraged?
I noticed in the document that Aurelien recently created referenced in this thread that in reference to the high pass filter or sharpness modules: Prefer the contrast equalizer for fine sharpness, or local contrast for general sharpness. and Prefer the contrast equalizer to unblur the optics via the presets provided, or the local contrast for general tone. There is also other references to the use of local contrast if used in local Laplacian and not pushed to far (since it is in Lab mode). Edit: Meant to say you can still push local contrast fairly far, but do watch for any negative impacts.
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Thanks! I just pulled DT today after realizing that it was time to abandon the PaintShop Pro v5.1 that I’ve probably been using for 20+ years. So, I’m looking at how much do I want to do in DT vs. what I’d need to do in Gimp.
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Hi’ @anon41087856
I really appreciate your darktable 3.0 for dummies….
!
Theory is great, and you have put a huge effort into explaining the theory, thank you very much. But practice is even more important…….I think that examples showing how to use filmic in different situations is just what is asked for by many users. The example is great, but I think that maybe the image is not challenging enough to show the benefit of filmic.
If you open the photo the default way (using the base curve) you get a very nice image. The white foam is clipped a little bit but this can easily be cured by adjusting the white point in the shadows and highlights module! So what is the difference? Could you demonstrate the advantage of using the three step filmic approach in this or in another photo?
I thought that curve clipping (when part of the curve is orange) was the same as over/under exposed indication. This is apparently not the case. You can get over/under exposed indication even though the filmic curve is not orange in parts?
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Practice and theory are really 2 children from the same mother. There is not one more important than the other. Practice without theory is just applying recipes, not becoming a chef.
Robustness to harsh settings. Halos arise very soon in shadows/highlights module. Also, adjusting a base curve node by node is tedious and you get no reference around which to roll your correction. Filmic rolls the correction around the grey value you define, so that gives you a predictible reference for your output (you know where middle grey, white and black will land beforehand). Base curve is a freestyle thing.
The base curve is intended to look good straight out, but if you try to do further advanced editing, you will find that it messed up shadows beyond recovery (that might be ok depending on how much low-lights you need to push up). Filmic is not supposed to be a stand-alone correction, but to provide a better ground for further editing (at least, fully separating luma from chroma adjustments). So it’s really a matter of going far vs. going fast.
Orange parts mean you have messed up the local contrast in affected parts by clipping the signal, since filmic output display-referred values (bound to [0 ; 1]). That has nothing to do with absolute clipping (just looking at the output values alone), but rather with losses of details (gradients) in some luminances.
Also, people misunderstand the over/under exposed alert in darktable. It is set up to show the first and last percentiles of the histogram. In these few percents, some values might be outside the [0 ; 1] range, but most of them will definitely be in the valid range, straight on the boundary.
Generally, I wish people would stop doing photography by the numbers and giving that much meaning to metrics they don’t really understand (obviously). If the result looks ok, then the picture is ok. We don’t retouch an histogram, but a picture. Histogram are just additional scopes to diagnose problems.
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Practice s something you can’t get by looking at workflows gurus shows, you need to do it yourself based on the explanations why something works in a specific way. So best ist to start hands on and then ask if you need assistance… but don’t give up to early
Thank you for your answer and for all the effort you put into this issue……! I will over the next weeks try to edit a number of shots the linear-rgb-way and the old fashion way to see if I notice a more robust result using filmic. If I notice some distinct differences I will publish it in this forum (if the image is suited to be published) and I will hereby encourage everybody else do the same……
I totally agree that you should edit images to your liking and not according to numbers. Clipping indicators are supposed to be useful to guide you but you have to have access to a user guide/manual to know what the various indicators mean. They are not self explanatory. So I am looking forward to study an updated version of the darktable manual, hopefully in a not too distant future….
It’s evident from the forum that many users are uncertain as to which dt tools are working well together and which are not. This is very well explained in your paper:
“darktable 3: RGB or Lab? Which modules? Help !”
I think the English version is fine as it is, no language problem. It would be a giant step forward if your advice somehow could be built into dt itself. If you activate filmic then the appropriate other tools could be “highlighted”?
If I can do anything to help please let me know.
If you can tell if a module is “on” then this should be really easy.
Make your own module group and save it to use whenever you want. It’s a powerful way to organize just those modules you want. You can even adjust it as you get more comfortable using other tools.
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Is it possible to define your own module group except for selecting tools in the “favorite” group?
It could of course be a good option for users who have studied the documentation. In my opinion it would be even better if this type of guidance as to which modules work with which modules was built into dt by default.
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Nearly all modules works with all modules, it depends on the issue to solve. Maybe you start with the basic modules as described by Aurélien, but then you add crop or perspective correction, apply lens correction, denoising, retouch, several kinds of contrast equalizer settings etc.pp …
So select your favourites and you‘re fine.
If you want to group modules yourself, you can do this in darktablerc. Theres a shellscript regrouping modules in the tools directory (https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/blob/master/tools/iop-layout.sh)
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Thank you…
I think there is a preset to clear all the modules…you could add back the ones you want and then save that as a workspace…
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Sorry, a little late but better late than never
I don’t know what the best option is, honestly, between user manual, videos, forums, etc. I feel like all the info is already there in several versions, and it’s still not enough.
I always liked darktable, among other reasons, for its mostly complete documentation.
To me, the most natural way of giving away knowledge like your excellent explanations would be a second page on the darktable website under resources named something like “Best practices and background information”.
While I agree, that a lot/most/all information is there, if you are not an avid reader on this message board, the content seems to be scattered all over.
It doesn’t even need to be completely rewritten for the main page. Just have an easy to find headline and link here, youtube or darktable.fr
But at least this way, someone new but interested will find the technical manual as well as some comments by one or more of the devs why there are 77 modules and why you don’t need all of them or what modules are recommended at the moment. These little how-tos and short comments about why a certain decision has been made would give a better understanding of the software in its recent state.
Also the content that goes far beneath the surface would have an easy to find place for the user that likes to know what goes on under the hood.
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Hi’ @priort
Thank you for your post. I noticed this option the other day, but I haven’t tried it yet. At present I auto apply filmic, tone equalizer, contrast equalizer and color balance in default mode whenever I open a photo.
Works fine.
I agree.
I think we badly need an updated user manual covering 3.0.
I watched Bruce Williams tutorial on color balance the other day. He clearly states that there are some options he can’t explain since they are not covered in the available documentation! Documentation of the tone equalizer is also missing.
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