The only thing still bothers me a lot about darktable is its sharpening. I have been using DorS a lot lately but I can’t say I am 100% satisfied with it. In my journey I realized that lens correction blurs the pic a lot so stopped using it, which did improve the sharpening but still it doesn’t do as same as the JPG straight out of camera. I am aware the camera JPGs could be overcooked for sure but at the end of the day a bit sharper pic really is not something we all want?
Let me give you an example. I shot many pics nice and sharpe on one of the family event. I had Canon R6, 85mm 1.2 USM. I shoot in Raw+jpg. When I see my processed Raw along side with Jpg, I feel bit disappointed with sharpness of processed Raw.
You should probably share an example raw, xmp and jpeg, or it’s going to be hard to give any sort of specific feedback.
That said, here are some general observations and questions:
It adds a bit of softness in the corners, mostly. No one will ever notice at normal viewing sizes and distances, except in some extreme cases.
Your camera does additional sharpening, unless you tell it not to. It probably also applies lens correction, including distortion correction (which causes softness in the corners, just like in DT).
No. You will find plenty of photographers that don’t care about sharpness. Some because they don’t care at all, but most because they realise that beyond a certain minimum level, mostly dictated by the subject matter and display medium, it just doesn’t matter. Personally, except in certain cases, I apply only capture sharpening (either of the two sharpen demosaicing presets in DS).
At what zoom level do you compare? Actual viewing size and resolution? Blown up to 100%? 200%? Are you pixel peeping?
I feel confident in saying that you are not. If you can’t match your camera, then it’s because you don’t understand how to properly use your tools. Darktable has very powerful sharpening features.
Ah, here is the topic I really wanted to recommend to @sherebiahtishbi, but was previously unable to find it. It’s very(!) long, but there are many examples, with XMP sidecars and screenshots of module settings.
recently watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmcQbdddhpk - i usually use no AA filter preset under diffuse and sharpen module then a medium lens deblur and another instance of local contrast fine (also under defuse and sharpen) i am using an adapted old canon kit film lens so it’s quite soft
I did an experiment. I made duplicates of an image (Boris the Spider) and did the exact same editing except for the sharpening method. My first edit that I posted in the Play Raw thread used D&S - Lens Deblur Medium. My three re-edits used D&S - Sharpen Demosaicing (AA Filter), D&S - Sharpen Demosaicing (no AA Filter), and Contrast Equalizer - deblur: Fine Blur: Strength 3.
Then I made comparisons by zooming in on the spider’s head and thorax, which have a lot of detail. All four methods look significantly better than without sharpening. But I can see very little difference between the four methods. However, the one with D&S - Sharpen Demosaicing (AA Filter) looks slightly more pleasing, although I cannot cite any specific difference; I could just be fooling myself about this.
One more observation now! While editing it still looks sharp enough to my satisfaction but when I export, the JPG turns out to be bit softer!! Anyone had same experience?
Yes, the issue is that in the darkroom view the modules only process a scaled-down version of the image (i.e. the pixels you can see on your screen). This means that any sharpening will appear to be too much when zoomed out. You can either zoom in to see a more accurate view or click on the “high quality processing” button on the bottom of the screen, which will process the full-scale image (but will take a lot longer than the normal darkroom processing).
