What attracts my attention is that while the photographs are from various people (and some are with quite good quality) - a lot of them appear to be muted down - almost underexposed.
It has been demonstrated many times that good exposure, contrast, saturation can be achieved in DT. I am curious however what affects so many pictures from different photographers to feel so alike.
Is it that we are afraid to sharpen the images or simply we prefer them to be muted down?
As I said - a lot of the photographs are very good. It is just somewhat a particular mood or particular feel.
Not sure if I am over analyzing. It is more of a curiosity than anything else.
I wasnât aware of a dt Flickr group. I went to have a look, and the images do as a whole look a little darker than average. Fortunately for me, that aligns with my taste.
I noticed this in the group rules:
Please donât post bugs or feature requests on discussions, they should go in our Redmine: redmine.darktable.org/
After a quick look through I only found a couple of muted photographs. Do you have an example of a group showing what you consider more ânormalâ edits?
I scrolled through the first two pages and they looked OK to me, there is some real nice work there. I certainly wouldnât classify them as underexposed on the whole.
Please have a look at this one. Most likely not all photos would be considered the best of course - some are better than others. But - there is quite a bit of variety when it comes to exposure, contrast, saturation - and this is very much expected as there are multiple contributors that are independent from one another.
I agree - some pictures are quite nice.
I almost feel like there is a particular mood or a feel (strangely achieved by multiple people).
Check out Arekâs images⌠up until recently he was using DT 3.0⌠he may have only now just bumped up a bit⌠I would say he doesnât have a muted look so it may be by choice in some cases or it may be how people export. I think I recall more than one topic over the last few month about exported images seeming to be darker than expected⌠in any case Arek has some great images processed with DTâŚ
Thanks! I looked at the âwallâ of the darktable group and scrolled deeper which revealed a certain look to the pictures. To me it seems like itâs the trademark pastel/salmon of filmic showing through? For a long time there was a lot of that look with dt playraws as well.
The other group had consistently overdone pp in my view, but itâs a common look.
I think I have to search the forums for these. Maybe a few of us are falling in some default setting that is overlooked. If you have links to the topics - I would appreciate a point in the right direction.
Yes - Iâve seen so many beautifully processed images (mostly here in the forums). So looking at the flickr group did puzzle me a bit.
Is there a way how to do so without possibly offending the author? It is not a critique group.
With early versions of filmic - there was a tendency to de saturate highlights and shadows. To some extend it is beneficial and desired functionality. But (part) of the user base somewhat accepted is the preferred norm (to a point that some would consider it wrong to saturate highlights and shadows). Not sure if @nosle was pointing to this.
I think some are drawn to more extreme (or we can say overdone) edits while others appreciate more the realistic look (and both are good in their own way).
The two art forms do not oppose one another - they are just different - like color vs b/w.
But it is an interesting observation when an outsider is to consider the 2 groups and observe the set mood.
To illustrate a point - if we are to imagine that some of the nightlife pictures of Arek are within the group on Flicker - I imagine they would stand out quite a bit the colors are much more vivid.
This fair. In my mind we are critiquing the tooling, not the author, which I think is OK. You are free to disagree.
Iâve already said I thought there werenât that many that showed the salmon problem, which is a specific problem of orange-ish colorful highlights turning pinkish, like a nice salmon, not a problem of generally saturating highlights.
Yes - it is the tooling but in a sense of influencing the author.
On a further look - I agree - there are not many - just few
What I am looking more at are deep shadows and bright highlights.
Within the group I am easily observing it within clothing and flowers. The highlights are not bright enough and the shadows are not deep enough. This is why âmuted colorsâ - not enough brightness / contrast / saturation.
It is possible to say that it is completely intentional (some people have particular style). The surprising item (for me) is that the only common item that I can see is the tool - not the author. Since the tool is capable to achieve very different results (we all know that) how did it happen that so many authors are drawn to the same mood.
If it is intentional - then while possible it is unusual with so many different authors
If it is not intentional (the author was aiming for something different but could not achieve it) - then most likely possibilities would include
Lack of experience
Sticking to default setting (perhaps perceiving that the default is good enough).
Hesitance to push the tool (perhaps being concern that it may affect the image negatively - even if the perception is not realistic).
If I am the only person who observes a pattern then maybe I am just over analyzing
If multiple people share my opinion - then it is simply something to note of how users behave.
The benefit (to me) would be find out what others think about the group and the quality of the processing done.
And if others share my opinion - at the very least these would be items that I would have to be more careful with when I work on my own photos.
One thing might be the standard use of filmicâŚwhy⌠if the image is not one with a lot of dynamic range and it can be managed with exposure and a color grade and some contrast why compress tones for no reason⌠I try almost every edit first with out filmic or sigmoid. I make liberal use of the tone eq and I find that you end up in many images with more nature detail preservation without even having to try to recover it. I think also then you will see brighter highlights and deeper shadows⌠I suspect many edits with filmic could be done without it and many that use it should be accompanied by some perceptual brilliance work to tweak those areas and further fine tune the compression introduced by using filmicâŚ
Interesting thoughts. I just had a look through the first two pages of the dt flickr group (which oddly enough I wasnât really aware of), and I agree that some of the pics do have a distinctly muted look (too much so for my taste), however on balance I think the overall collection looks fairly natural.
I wonder if many dt users may be darktable users because it does allow for very delicate editing - maybe a reaction to the sometimes âovercookedâ style favoured in some mainstream groups?
This is my Flickr page Monaro Photography | Flickr@vbs what do you think of my collection? I wonât be offended at all, whatever you feel about it, but would be interested in your thoughts. My style is always changing anyway, and I think some of my earlier stuff was more muted. Not sure.
There are a lot of good pictures. I would like to shoot more portraits actually but what I end up shooting is mainly family photos and some landscapes here and there. So - naturally I am drawn to the landscapes that you take.
