Here’s my thinking in that regard: Open your raw, then immediately select the Neutral profile at the top right. Then, you’ll be looking at the linear RGB data, with only white balance applied (if I’m missing something, RT users, please correct me) . This is the starting point for any tone manipulation, and instead of comparing alternatives, you’ll be thinking of it as what’s being done to the raw capture. That’ll be a much better basis for developing understanding of what’s going on…
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You probably missed that this is a darktable thread 
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Yes I did… cripes.
How does one start with neutral in Darktable, now that the processing chain is exposed… ???
@Tim W-e-l-l… If you prefer the warm development, then that is the best one. It is the one that you like that is the best.
Trying to find a neutral spot, to set the white point “correct”: how about placing the white balance module’s preset spot to the vertical white plank at the corner of the house? That would give you a temperature of about 5900K.
How does that look to you?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
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Turn off everything except demoasic, white balance, and orientation
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Setting the ‘pixel workflow defaults’ to ‘None’ and disabling ‘auto-apply sharpen’ should give you this as a starting point for every photo, if you like.
This is a more difficult image to get a decent white balance. There are many small parts that look somewhat neutral, but there is a strong color fringing coming from the lens.
The small grey areas are overlapped by cyan and magenta, and much color noise.
That makes defining white balance with a color picker difficult. Your second example with the house and cars is much easier for that.
I would use the spot option from the white balance module and then use the color picker to take some color samples from a few neutral areas. After that I would fine-tune the white balance to get proper color values in the color picker’s areas.
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That’s CA. darktable has raw CA correction. Enabling it you should be able to get the same result as in my screenshot from RawTherapee (left without, right with raw CA correction) as it basically uses the same algorithm. The one in RT is a bit refined, but for the screenshot I used settings in RT to match the darktable version (though iirc in darktable it does (or did) not work well in preview, but in full processing it should work fine).
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Thanks, everyone. It is a cheap little camera with a pretty cheap lens. I guess that’s why all the color aberration.
Which can be corrected in post processing
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It does not show a processing tab, for me. Only GUI options, Core options, Session options, Shortcuts, and Presets. I have looked through all of those, and I do not see a place where I could select scene referred or display referred.
I am running the latest available release of darktable (3.0.2-7) on Arch Linux.
The scene-referred/display-referred setting is for darktable 3.2, which hasn’t been officially published yet. I think it should be available in the next few days, and it streamlines things a bit:
- the “mid-grey” slider is removed from the new filmic in 3.2, since “exposure” module is now used instead. If you still have old filmic, just set mid-grey value to “18.45”
- the new filmic sets the white point to +4EV, and black point to -8EV, which is a good starting point for a properly exposed picture (if the image is not properly exposed, use the “Exposure” module to compensate)
- adding the “local contrast” module will often improve the image somewhat
- if more colour saturation is required, this can be done with “colour balance” module, using the output saturation slider.
- if you want to selectively tweak the exposure in parts of the image (eg. shadows, highlights, etc.) then tone equaliser works well.
Those are the primary modules I use now (and white balance, of course).
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Yeah, my bad! Sorry.
I thought you used 3.2 or the latest development. Looking back I do not know where I got that idea…
Looks to me like the first image has warmer WB and is more saturated. You could get the second image closer by using the White Balance module (temperature slider) and using the Color Balance module (Output Saturation slider).
Somewhat more advanced tip: you could use a parametric mask on the CB module to exclude already-saturated colors (such as the blue sky) from the saturation boost, if desired.
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I think I’m making some progress. This photo was challenging because it was taken in pretty deep shade, and there’s really nothing white it it to balance on. There were also three areas where the exposure was really blown out. I did everything with a filmic workflow.
I really appreciate all the help and tips you all have given me. This is a very friendly community.
The first jpg is from a straight magick convert. The second one is of my darktable work. The original raw file is also attached.
DSC_4006.NEF.xmp (11.7 KB)
DSC_4006.NEF (18.5 MB)
You can white balance off the top part of the camera, it should be a fairly neutral colour. These are some simple edits in darktable 3.0.2 using white balance + color balance + filmic + local contrast. The second picture tweaks the composition a bit; I think it might be better to have a bit more negative space in front of the photographer, who I guess is the main subject of the photo.
DSC_4006_01.NEF.xmp (6.7 KB) DSC_4006_02.NEF.xmp (6.7 KB)
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Morning, @Tim,
There are several spots you can use for white balance,
like the white cloth on his shorts, or the logo at the back
of his shoes.
Here is my interpretation…
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
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This is how I did the white balance: Took some samples from shoe, shorts and the brighter parts of the camera (ditched the shorts later because of the color gradient there) and adjusted red and blue channel until the values in the color picker were almost equal.
There is much green light in this situation coming from the foliage when it reflects the sun light. You can see that in the upper part of the lens cap. I took the brighter part right of the round button because it looked like it got direct sun light.
Went a bit further in the image with filmic (v4) and local contrast, didn’t went to sharpen and denoise it. Removed a bit of the red color from the face.
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Thank you, @Matt_Maguire, @Claes, and @pphoto.
I had tried several of those white balance methods, and for me, some of them made the colors turn goofy. I tried the black of the top of the camera and the “white” stripe on the shorts. I tried a few other places. I know that my “final” came out dark and murky, but when I tried to bring the overall levels up, I kept getting clipping.
I think I did a great job with the blowouts on his thumb, calf, and left shoulder. But I lost a lot of the detail of his black shorts, the rocks, and the water. It really seems that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
I am reading and viewing the materials of Aurélien Pierre. It’s a lot to take in, but I’m learning.
Thanks, @pphoto, very educative. I find your edit very good and realistic (but I haven’t been there, so I might be wrong)
If you spend some extra time on the shorts, you could even find a spot which is almost pure neutral gray
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