My family shoots 1000s of photos with a mobile phone (27MP JPG). Just “click” and that was it. I think different, take pictures in RAW and edit every photo individually. My mobile phone photos are for documentation with 2MP and quality doesn’t matter. But of course I want to help my family to have better photos.
Is there a way to do an auto correction with darktable 5, hoping that 80% of the photos get better?
I am not familiar with darktable 5.
What comes into my mind are style presets. What do you suggest?
Goal should be, loading the filmroll into darktable, doing something automatically and then rendering it. No problem, if the photo gets sometimes worse.
It might be worth mentioning what model camera you have. I would see creating a picture style as your best bet. The method I describe below would require a similar or the same shot with a JPG version and a RAW version.
I created my own Canon R7 style in DT that would effectively achieve a one click edit that gives a good starting poin which is sometimes enough on its own.
I created this by selecting a well exposed daylight picture with skin tones neutral tone areas and parts of the image which were strong colors of red, green, blue, yellow. It was actually a street scene from Japan with a couple of girls posing for a shot.
First I opened the camera’s JPG and took a snapshot. I then opened the RAW and used the snapshot as a comparison.
I set the exposure slider to match the JPG
I set color calibration to as shot in camera
I applied basic denoising and sharpening
I applied default local contrast
I increased contrast in the sigmoid module to 1.7
I applied shadow and highlights module at default values
I did some tweaks in color balance RGB module to adjust shadows and contrast
Finally I did some saturation tweaks of various color zones to lift the saturation of the reds in the image to better match the color look of the JPG.
This style was then saved and with one click I get a great starting point for my edits. I plan to do this for all of my cameras. BTW, a landscape style might need to lift the saturation of the blues and the greens where this Canon R7 style needed more warmth in the skin tones and hence the color zones adjustment.
On my pixel 8 I only process a raw that has some sort of artifact from all the Google processing…computational miscues…otherwise the JPG are for the most part superior to anything I would get with some universal style or even some fairly involved edits… Maybe other phones are different… but that is my 2cents on working with the pixel 8
Please be patient. Weather is bad at the moment. Could take longer than a week. Normally my family uses the phone for photos. I try to take some pictures, when the weather gets better. Backlight at noon can be horrible. Simply, don’t take such photos.
RAW photos from the phone use very much space and are normally useless (for me). If quality is needed I prefer a Ricoh GR III, we have 2. Actually my family prefers the mobile phone instead.
No, you might use darktable for that but that’s like going to a mechanic’s workshop, although a multitool is sufficient for the task …
It’s not the scope of darktable to do automatic stuff for users that don’t want to spend effort learning how to get good results from the bunch of modules provided.
Don’t expect an automatic processing in a third party tool to be better than the automatic jpg out of camera - the manufacturers spends a lot of effort to get good results.
darktable is a tool to chose, if you’re not satisfied with out of camera results and have an idea how the image should be instead…
Maybe the palm photos (trachycarpus) are good for testing.
The photos are taken with proshot.
The same photos with opencamera and DRO would look a lot better, but it doesn’t make sense to improve photos which are already corrected with shadow and light.
I understand this, why I use a dedicated camera and not a phone? I prefer quality over quantity. Who will ever see so many photos again in years, they are too much. But my family has a different opinion.
Maybe if you could just share one out of camera JPG and RAW file of the same scene. Make it a well exposed shot in daylight. I could then try and show you how it might be possible to make a style that matches your camera. DT is not an auto processer for one click edits but if you are willing to put the effort in then DT styles can go a long way towards what you want with a one click applying the style. In the case of my cameras I can closely replicate the look of the out of camera JPG with the sytles I create but find I get sharper details and more details in the shadows from DT than the cameras JPG.
Sorry the supplied folder of pictures was nearly a GB and too large to download through my internet at home.
I use this profile for art, in general it works quite well as a starting point for at least 3 phones i use (xiaomi included). Sometimes i like to add some lab cromaticty, often to fine tune white balance, curves, and maybe rgb curves. I almost always shot at base iso.
You do not need the whole folder, if you open the folder you have previews and can download the image you think it is usable. There is always a jpg file and a dng-file taken automatically at the same moment.
Thanks a lot, please give me time to test it. I have strange problems with my pc and have to buy a new one, which means a lot searching of tests. I never used dt 5 and have to read a lot of documention too.
So if you could explain in a few words, what I have to do to test your file, it would be easier for me. Anyway I have to learn a lot about dt changes.
I would recommend taking a picture with skintone (hand or face would be suitable) neutral tones like grey road, white t-shirt and colours representing reds, blues, greens and yellows at least. I would definitely want grey and skin tone somewhere in the image to try and create a DT style.
When you look at the screenshot below, there is a palm trees in backlight, the darker one is the dng-file. Is it possible to autocorrect the under-exposure?
My family does nothing, only collecting. There are underexposed pictures and they don’t care, even if I try to explain them to think before taking the photo. It is so easy nowadays, you can look at the display and know you have to correct the exposure with the volume button. But they don’t, they only press the display for a photo.
With an automatic editing, it could get better only.
Unfortunately I have a very problematic pc at the moment and have to build a new one. The other side is, I have to learn darktable 5, but a working pc comes first. So t will take time to go on with this topic.
I would say no. It is unrealistic to expect auto correction of one click in DT. It is not hard to grab the exposure slider and brighten the picture to suit your needs, but a backlit shot may be better handled with a combination of the tone equalizer module and the shadow and highlights module to brighten the shadows.
A picture style like I am sugesting will give you a good starting point, but you will still have to tweak exposure and shadows if they are way off.
That would be fine for me, but not for my family. Of course it is simple to change the brightness, a.s.o. but this means having a look at the photo, spend a few seconds and correct it. They take so many photos and are not interested to editing a phote. Sorry for this, I want to help my family only.
It is a quite good solution to use DRO with opencamera. A lot of backlight photos are quite acceptable then, but not all. DRO increases the light and reduces the peaks. So DRO does some things automatically, which could be done with dt a lot better.
It seems DT will not be the solution for your family. Maybe one of the online editing tools that can be installed on phones would suit their needs best.
I played with this, not so bad, but takes longer than do it with dt manually. Source was the jpg-file, which is already optimized. I don’t like software subscriptions. Forum photo has reduced quality because of the size (of course).
From the 2nd screenshot the 1st image in the row before the last row.
