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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I have taken to trying to sharpen less. I looked back on some of my very old photos from point and shoot camera’s and if I took a good shot I found I liked the look of it. I wasn’t exactly sure at first but they were from an old sony with no raw feature back in 2005… Yet they were colorful and pleasing but I started to notice that they were less sharp than what I often crank out now… So it is time to reflect a bit on that. What I have been experimenting with and I like it is that I now leave a bit of room for sharpening and then I use the RL_output macro and dial that back just a little and apply that on export. I think the default radius is 0.7 or something and 10 iterations… I dialed it back to 0.5 and it does a nice little correction…
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I think this is the part that most people miss and there isn’t a lot of discussion about.
When in post, I try and simply list the feeling I’m trying to evoke or the point I’m trying to get across. I try to make it as simple as possible, then work backward to arrive at the set of technical details I need to implement.
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+1
I think one of Boris’s videos covers this but I agree that there’s less discussion on the forum of this process than the purely technical side. I guess it’s quite subjective