Hello Boris. As usual another great episode, and thank you for that.
But I would like to know, is there any other procedure to achieve the same result easier and faster?
the same result? What do you expect to be simpler or faster? If you fear the channel mixer you might get similar results using colorbalancergb - but thats not faster or simpler. If you’re dealing with masks, then you do it because a one size fits all simple approach doesn’t work.
If you don’t need the same result but just put a little bit color sauce over the image, you can handle different colors with color zones in one module instance …
It’s your choice…
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If I knew, I would have shown it in the video. @MStraeten has mentioned a few possible ways as alternatives.
Color balance rgb with hue slider and 4 ways tab would possibly be easier to use but with many more instances and maskings.
I can’t imagine simpler and faster solutions from a logical point of view because it’s not just about simple global color adjustments but taking into account the context of the scene. So without multiple instances and masks that can’t be achievable.
And this is one of the strengths of darktable, that you can use very sophisticated color adjustment and masking functions to make precise changes. However, these must first be mastered.
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Thank you Boris, I was just asking for any alternatives, maybe I used the wrong words.Sometimes
we can achieve the same result using a module we know better.
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Not exactly the same, but color zones can be used for a similar purpose - shifting hue, saturation and lightness of specific colours.
Boris, I have tried applying the color harmony techniques to this Play Raw:
I found I was limited in room to move colors, so I don’t feel I accomplished much. If you had the time, I would be interested in seeing what you would do with it.
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The colors offered by the scene are excellent for analog complementary color harmony because the hues of the main motif, the horses, expand very nicely through the orange grass in the foreground without disappearing in this hue.
So on one side of the palette we have a series of analog warm colors that are nicely contrasted by the blue of the sky and the water in the background.
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Trying to get comfortable with the process but finding that the color ‘flares’ are not very readable (either log or lineal). This makes the process itself difficult to learn. Below is from a very saturated image.
When display samples on image/vectorscope and restrict scope to selection"options are active in global color picker, the brightness of colors in vectroscope is decreased to see the points. If you turn off these options, the colors become brighter.
Also, I will recommend medium gray for the background, because it makes the colors easier to see. White or black background distorts the contrast and intensity perception of the colors.
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I feel I understand the logic of the steps except the original color calibration. I white balanced it, but your final selections from that point were a movement of hue up into magenta and a slight decrease in chroma. What did you see or what goal did you have that you took that course of action?
Never mind. To just play around, I started from scratch and did the white balance immediately. That gave me your final selections automatically. My first attempt was out of sequence because I think you compressed the history and that moved color calibration from its original spot to later in the history, and white balancing at that point gave me a different result.
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White balance is an important (first) step. It is not always necessary, especially if you want to keep a certain look, but it helps to balance the colors of the scene first, before going on to further adjustment/modification.
Well, I used the colour harmonies in the vectorscope for the first time after watching your tutorial. I’d discarded this shot previously but I think the colour work, and a hell of a lot of contrast twiddling rescues it somewhat. Thanks Boris.
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The first thing I saw when I clicked it to enlarge was the two people up top - gives a wonderful sense of scale. Looks like the light was tricky but like it a lot actually.
Yes, light was contrasty. Always end up on these walks at wrong time of day for photography. Looked murky SOOC and into Darktable and wasn’t sure if the figures stood out enough. I like that pics in DT initially look quite flat as gives a lot of opportunity for taking them in different directions but maybe sometimes it makes me a bit too conservative in how far to push them as they start looking quite colourful compared with the starting point
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This is, in my opinion, the most important insight that anyone who wants to get serious about photography has to reach at some point in time.
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Just got round to watching this. This video is great and combined with the other video from Johanna, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities. Really helpful for giving you some direction in editing your photos. Thanks very much Boris!
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Boris.
IMHO You should do two before/after comparisons.
First before = just after doing lens correction. We have global before/after.
Second before = just before doing “Color harmony” steps. Before and after “color harmony”.
When it is only snapshot just after doing lens correction I don’t know what beauty is made by tone and global color correction and what is made strictly by “color harmony”.
Greetings. Your movies has big education advantage for me.
Darek K
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Insted of “You should” it should be “It would be very helpfull” 
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Another fantastic video, Boris, and I’m really looking forward to part 2.
I have become so much better with the channel mixer over the last year, but I still don’t feel I have mastered it. I think I understand the fundamentals of it, but working out which sliders to use is still not always coming to me naturally. For example, if I’m working with an orange colour, which channel is best to start adjusting? With orange being a mix of red and yellow, is it best to start with the Red channel or the Blue channel? And then once you have decided on the channel, which is the best input slider to start with? I still feel that I fall back to trial and error quite often (although it’s not completely random).
You often explain why you use certain channel mixer sliders in your videos, but I always seem to forget when I sit down in front of darktable. I was wondering, do you have some kind of “thought workflow” to help remember how to approach channel mixer. For example:
- The colour I want to change is x
- I want to change colour x to colour y
- Colour x is composed of colours a and b
- Therefore I should use the ? channel and push the ? input slider towards ?, then compensate by using ? slider, etc.
Something like that?
I’m looking for a foolproof way I can remember how to approach it. If you don’t work this way, don’t worry, but thought I’d ask because I feel you do have some kind of similar methodology based on your videos.
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Ok. This simple RGB model is the best tool to understand what needs to be changed:
And as you can see, yellow is the combination of of equal values of red and green in the absence of blue.
Orange color you get - similar to how you mix colors in painting - by mixing in a bit more red. So, orange is more reddish yellow, so to speak. That is, if you want to get orange from yellow, you have to increase the value of red.
The problem is - if I want to do that in the example above, it doesn’t work, because we have very bright yellow, which means both the red and the green is already at maximum. So, I can’t increase the red:
But, what I can do is decrease the amount of green and thus the amount of red becomes higher than green and I get orange:
So now I got orange from yellow but as you can see, green became darker and also other colors where the green was involved have changed:
- white (where all 3 channels are mixed together with equal share) got magenta
- cyan (combination of blue and green) got blue
The same result as above with curves can be obtained with channel mixer. I can use input green in green channel (here in GIMP is called Green in Green channel) to reduce proportion of green:
Thus I changed - just like in the example above - all colors where the green channel plays a role.
But if I use input red in the green channel (in GIMP Red in Green channel) instead of input green, I only affect the areas where the red channel was involved:
So, yellow becomes orange and white becomes magenta. the cyan (combination of blue and green) is not affected.
Now to answer your question where to start. Here is a concrete example. We have an autumn scene and the leaves are too orange. We want to make them a little more yellowish.
So, we need to increase the amount of green or decrease the amount of red to get yellow. Now the question is, what other colors do we want to influence as well?
In the green channel we can use input green. This will affect all the areas where the green channel is involved:
That is, next to the yellow leaves, the sky also became greenish because the green channel is also present in the sky (combination between green and blue).
But if we do not want to influence the sky, we can use input red in green channel:
Since we are affecting the areas where the red channel is present, the sky will not be affected, but everything that was red before will become orange because this is the area where logically the red channel has the highest value. Correspondingly, - if we use these proportions of the red channel for the increase of green - the increase of green value will be strongest there:
Another possibility would be to reduce the red in the red channel.
If you want to protect the sky, you can use input red, because red channel is not present in the sky. However, this will make the photo a little darker:
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