Darktable masking tutorials Boris Hajdukovic - great stuff!

[Mike_Bing]

All of these taken on my KP this morning with the gloriously sharp Irix on the body and live-view focusing with peaking enabled. Shot in raw (PEF) as always. Raws converted in Darktable using some combined parametric and drawn masks to only apply diffuse sharpening (3 iterations) on the actual flowers.

I watched and rewatched Boris’s part I and part II on masking techniques and used a combined parametric and drawn mask in the [diffuse or sharpen] module to apply sharpening at 3 iterations of the flowers themselves without increasing noise in the other parts of the image or increasing sharpness in the flower stems. I hoped it would end up giving a bit more of a 3D feel to the images. Of course the wide aperture of F1.4 didn’t exactly hurt either.

First one has just a little extra edit in Gimp to clone out a distracting highlight in the top-left of the image. I used parametric mask on the Cz channel on the yellow flowers, hz channel for the other two. One had an additional drawn gradient mask, the other two had additional drawn brush masks.

I’m a DT user ever since the Dark Ages (v.1.4 I suppose) but this is the first time I successfully used these masking techniques and I’m blown away by the flexibility and control they allow.

Here’s one screenshot of the masking in progress

Strongly recommend these Youtube tutorials, links below:
Part 1: Darktable Episode 67: Advanced masking part 1: parametric masks - YouTube
Part 2: Darktable Episode 68: Advanced masking part 2: parametric and drawn masks - YouTube

[priort (Todd Prior)]

Check out the details mask as well…very powerful to select details only or invert or adjust for the opposite…

[Miha_Pece]

I think you’ve managed to achieve a 3D effect. In the first photo, it may even be a little too wet for my liking. The background works more like a backdrop for me. Others are OK.

But yes, Boris is a legend!

[Mike_Bing]

@priort

details mask

Hmmm, where do I check that out? I only seem to have uniform, drawn, parametric, drawn & parametric, raster as options in the masking part of the modules. Probably I’m not looking in the right place.

[Colin_Adams (Colin Paul Adams)]

It’s a option for masking, not a another type of mask.

[priort (Todd Prior)]

[Mike_Bing]

Thx! Hadn’t tried that yet.

[Terry (Terry Pinfold)]

@priort thanks for pointing out this details threshold slider which I had been unaware of. What a great feature for sharpening and denoising issues. This is something I will have a lot of use for.

[priort (Todd Prior)]

Ya its really awesome for selecting or excluding the extreme and or fine details…