Thank you for all the effort you put in the videos.
Very informative, and I especially apprecheate the little didactic tricks, like the sketch of the portrait in the middle grey 
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Ya I don’t bother to fiddle any more with color options…When I use filmic I just use v5 with no chroma preservation. I really don’t care about what the other modes correct or don’t correct. I set the latitude to be ~25-50% and then just adjust the midtone saturation and shift it if needed towards the highlights or shadows until i get the look I want… I find this to offer the most control… If you zero that slider you will have a basically an monochrome image and if you push it to the max it will be over the top saturated with color so I find this one of the best ways to fine tune a starting point. Its much less flat than v6, you don’t get the strict gamut handcuffs and often you don’t need to do much with color balance other than tweak the color rather than have to add substantial chroma and saturation there that is needed when you use v6. I am sure there are arguments against this approach but for me it just feels like it offers offers the widest range of possibility. I am just glad that it was not replaced by the new version and it is an option… The good thing is now there are 4 options for people…basecurve, 2 versions of filmic and sigmoid so DT can really cater to providing an initial look that shoudl suit most people…
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Do you decide whether to use filmic or sigmoid at the start of your edit? I normally left filmic alone previously, maybe making a few minor tweaks of the curve but mostly using it as an automatic guardrail for dynamic range. However, now that we have sigmoid as an alternative it means I use filmic as the default as usual then try sigmoid at the end to see if it does a better job. In some cases it does but in others obviously it won’t because I’ve already edited the pic to fit with filmic. My guess is I need to decide on one or the other earlier but it’s not 100% clear to me at the start of an edit which would be the better option. Maybe I’ll figure it out from experience…
I still use filmic because it’s routine for me and I get desired results quickly enough. With some photos I try also like you sigmoid to have comparison. However, I then process these versions from the start.
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Thanks Boris. Makes sense
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New episode: The way to the goal:
Important note: The purpose of this video is exclusively to demonstrate how to achieve similar results with darktable as with other photo editing software! It is not meant to be a guide for copying the works of other photographers.
Please take this into consideration.
This episode refers to the following post in this forum:
In this video I referred to the following three interpretations:
Christian Möhrle:
My reproduction:
DSC00774.ARW.xmp (34,7 KB)
Daniel Laan:
My reproduction:
DSC00774_01.ARW.xmp (102,9 KB)
Antony Valenta:
My reproduction:
DSC00774_02.ARW.xmp (74,8 KB)
A special thanks to Christian Möhrle, who allowed us to use the files!
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Another great Darktable lesson, can’t wait to get home and watch it
oh, forgot to add, I can’t believe how close you come to other photographer’s edits
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As always, great tutorial! That said, it is kind of sad how hackneyed the “overcooked teal & orange” has become; after seeing it almost everywhere it ceases to become interesting.
Question: is there a reason you used contrast equalizer instead of diffuse and sharpen for the rocks and the bottom part of the last photo?
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Likewise here!
Indeed! I see it the same way. Besides that, by working on this video I also noticed the increasing tendency to over-sharpen the photos.
This tendency to strong local contrasts and sharpness was one of the reasons why I used the Contrast Equalizer rather than the Diffuse and Sharpen module.
I knew in advance that I would need several instances, which would be more precise with diffuse and sharpen, but computationally much more demanding. It consumes a lot of resources. Multiple instances can slow down processing a lot.
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Awesome video !
It’s amazing how you match the colors without using a color picker and compare the numbers. And always like magic when you “play” the channelmixer.
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This is actually not that difficult, because the variations of “teal and orange” presented here - as @Tamas_Papp correctly pointed out - are so often imitated that you can do them almost blindly:
In the end, it’s just a matter of saturation and a little fine-tuning.
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I also use multiple instances of contrast equalizer when I do sharpening, but I rarely do that, anymore.
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Lessons learned from this video:
- Get to learn the bl**dy channel mixer.
- Use the contrast equalizer
IMHO From all the steps performed in the videos, these 2 make the greatest impact and make the images ‘speak’
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What I learned form this video is that once you know what you want (which part you want brighter or darker, where to enhance contrast, what happens to colors), it is rather straightforward to achieve it in Darktable (with the exception of color calibration — @s7habo makes it look like magic, for me it takes much more experimentation, even though it becomes easier and easier with practice).
The difficult part is figuring out what you want. Trying to replicate a style of an existing image of course skips this step, so it is not about artistic choices, but technique.
The last video is also a great example of how small local corrections add up. Once you set up the basics (lens correction, corrective wb, exposure, maybe global mappings, etc), it may not be ideal to deal with the image as a whole. Just mask the part you want to work on and fix that, and iterate this until done.
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Bravo @Tamas_Pap ! 
This answer had to be printed in poster size and nailed to the front door of anyone who wants to learn to be good at photo processing!
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@s7habo was this by design or I think I heard you say to conserve CPU for the video… instead of D&S??
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Ya that makes perfect sense. Those were some pretty dramatic efforts. It was interesting and hard to judge from the videos, but many of the edits target edits seemed to have less than well managed highlights…It was subtle and it was YT but I think your edits in DT while looking similar preserved those highlights better. A few years ago when I was first starting to edit photo’s I was exploring options and I stumbled on a product called ON1 photo. I also stumbled on to DT around the same time. THe two things that struck me about the edits I could do at least back then was that the DT edits seemed to render better and look more natural and as I had edited. The output from ON1 just didn’t seem as nice and it was far far more saturated and contrasted right out of the gate. It reminded me more of the edits shown in the video. They could be border line HDR overload … but that is all personal taste. I found later that ON1 had an option in the profiles to use their linear profile which was closer to what you see when starting a DT edit and I could not believe how much color and contrast were pumped in to the photo out of the gate using their standard and landscape profiles…
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Yes, this is big disadvantage of “pre-made” looks that both cameras and then various photo editing software already offer as default settings. You become - without knowing it - a color and contrast junkie from the beginning.
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