Picture from last night. Darktable (DT) doesn’t seem to handle discolights very well.
As you see, the SOOC JPEG from my fuji X-T30 preserves details in highlights (on the dress) and does not over saturate the disco lights.
On the other hand, my edit in DT looks awful. Filmic does not preserve details in the highlights unless I bump up the “white relative exposure”. If I do this I have to add a lot of contrast and loses a lot of the softness. Also, the transition from the highlight to midtones in the discolights are really poorly handled by DT.
Any ideas of how to edit this? I’ve attached the raw file and my .xmp.
Let’s see: ISO2000 and DR200?
Actually, I do not think that there is so much to complain about Perhaps DR400 could have saved something of the over-exposure at sensor level (like under her arm pit), but still…
thanks for response.
Hmm… The details are there… Look at my edit. Just don’t like the side effects for “pulling them out”.
And shouldn’t the raw contain more details then the JPEG? No matter what ISO.
I’m more than satisfied with the JPEG.
For something this complex you will also need to try the various color preservation modes including off as the outputs will be very different. Sometimes I also try blending filmic in lightness mode just to see how that goes…There have been several threads recently about highlight reconstruction also…and older ones about blue or difficult lights…including the video mentioned above…Not sure where you want the lighting to end up…I tried to neutralize most of it…
You, Tobias, seem to be using darktable and although I already submitted a RawTherapee edit I wanted to do one in darktable as well just to see how hard that would be. I find this a lot harder to do in darktable compared to RawTherapee if I’m being honest. Maybe my sidecar, maybe combined with the other ones here, can help you a bit.
Tricky, a good learning exercise. Found unbreak input profile the only way to tame the lights. White balance could have been anything… I went for colourful.
Used a 2nd instance of color calibration for the areas lit by the LED (parametric mask for high Cz value, for non-red colours on the hz tab) with high gamut compression, -1 for colorfulness on G and B, a bit of channel mixer to further tame the LED lights.
Additionally, toned down highlight chromacity in color balance rgb (but boosted global vibrance).
In filmic, shifted shadow/highlight balance a bit to further soften the brighly illuminated areas. DSCF1505.RAF.xmp (8.2 KB)
Which is absolutely normal. If you don’t bump it, you ask it to clip highlights. Which it does.
The JPEG also shifts the blues to purple, which hides some of the issue and compresses the gamut in a way that might not be what you expect. Filmic preserves the original color, but that means you have to deal with chroma/saturation yourself.
As I have said times and times again, all other softwares use RGB curves applied on independent channels. Highlights will get desaturated at non-constant hue, shadows will be resaturated at non-constant hue. That will hide many color issues, chromatic aberrations, gamut escapes and so on. If you are new to image processing, you might mistake that “hiding” for a “fixing”. The problematic part here being the “non-constant hue”, which means the result is random and can’t be predicted from the input alone.
So filmic constrains the hue and will keep the chroma mostly unchanged. Which is not a fix for anything but a guaranty that your color-grading intent is honored at all costs, meaning no hue shift is introduced. But for gamut escapes like this, you need to relax some constraint somewhere, and that would be saturation.
Being able to set a good input profile seems a very good first step to take in this case. I still find it strange that darktable is limited to the, somewhat, simple ICC profiles if you want to apply an external one and not the more sophisticated DCP profile.
The standard colour matrix input profile that is applied out-of-the-box doesn’t do a good job (understatement) and linear Rec709 RGB is the best one to use if applying a dedicated DCP profile isn’t an option (which I have for this camera type).
This is just a first step, though, albeit an important one. Filmic is needed here, but isn’t all that easy to get right. I tried not using it but that doesn’t seem work.
Keeping all the colours in check and not desaturating them too much is a big challenge. Not sure if I am pleased with the overall look of my edit in that regard. I did tinker with it a bit more yesterday evening (sidecar - better colours?).
Anyway, this was a nice image to play with and learn from, both darktable and RawTherapee.
Perhaps DR400 could have saved something of the over-exposure at sensor level (like under her arm pit), but still…
