True, but with that he’ll never be alone.
OK and?
If you like his videos and fins them useful, that is good more power to you. They’re not all bad at all.
But he is still very new and clearly doesn’t understand the application super well.
Glad he’s taken it up ( esp after posting some extremely negative things about darkrable here) but IMO he should use it a bit more before making tutorials and what not.
And … I totally agree. I find his videos interesting to watch and listen to. The stuff from his primary domain, LR and Photoshop, is well prepared. While his DT episodes so far may seem less perfect to an expert - they are of a standard from which most DT beginners like myself can learn. No doubt that his DT episodes widens the general interest for DT. So, I forgive Andy the minor imperfections and praise the increased PR. I hope he’ll go on with DT as well as he’s engaged with RT.
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Here is my 2-penny bit.
I see it more as a difference between achieving excellence and very-good results. Professional photographers, who deal with hundreds of photographs, cannot afford to spend too much time on one photo to make it excellent. That is why they prefer the commercial products, which deliver very-good results very quickly. DT on the other hand will provide excellent results, but will take time to develop a single photo.
I have created a module group in DT which has a few, but the ones I use most often. It has around 7–8 modules. Yet, every so often, I realize that the modules are inadequate for a particular photo, and I search for the right one. This is the other problem with DT. It has far too many options, and the same/similar results can be achieved with alternative modules, so which to choose. It requires a person to be peaked in the science of color to differentiate one module from the other in its usage.
DT has the problem of plenty. So the long and short is to isolate your commonly used modules, and, if you have many photos to process, live with a very good result and not go for excellence, even if DT tempts you to do so with some other modules. The delta improvement may not justify the time spent.
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While there will be professionals dealing with hundreds of images (wedding?), others will be dealing with only a few per client (high level portraits).
Or you create a few groups (tabs) of several modules… you can exclude e.g. all display-referred modules, except those that cannot be duplicated by others (watermark).
Personally, I use four groups, each with about 8 modules. Some modules are present in more than one group, just for ease of use. The groups correspond more or less to editing stage (basic, “advanced”, specials).
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This all depends on what you want to do.
Yes, you can definitely spend hours on a photo, but you can also get a good baseline very quickly using presets and styles.
This is my “quick and dirty” workflow:
- use sigmoid, apply profiled noise reduction and lens correction to evey single photo.
- cull, crop and rotate what remains.
- on the remaining photos, adjust exposure, check WB and fix it if necessary, also fiddle with colors a bit in color balance rgb to taste.
- cull again, keep only the interesting photos with at least some potential.
- develop the rest with mild enhancements that give a large return to time invested, including tone equalizer, color correction (rgb primaries), diffuse & sharpen with presets. Use masks only at this stage, but don’t overdo it, basically matching shapes is fine with an elliptical mask. You can refine it later.
- cull, review, and fine tune with applicable techniques from this thread
1–2 takes me about 5sec/photo, 3–4 1–2 min/photo, 5–6 about 5–10 min/photo depending on what needs to be done. A lot of techniques from this excellent series of tutorials can be applied as presets, and you only need masking if you think the result is an improvement, so you can experiment very, very quickly.
I found that I can do about 500 photos in 3 hours, keeping about 10–30 of them.
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Getting on for a 1000 contributions to this thread, and for good reason - the videos are excellent, and attract excellent comments.
However, picking up on your workflow item 6 - I am very interested in Boris’ techniques and sometimes find it hard to search out the details. Has anyone tried to index this thread and Boris’ videos to list out the useful techniques and where they are discussed?
Hey Boris
I have a question about the two first edits you did in this video. Could you explain, when do you change the module order? I try to get my head around the module order. This would be highly appreciated.
Hey Joachim,
first of all it is important to clarify if you understand how the so-called “pixelpipe” works in darktable?
If not, I recommend reading this part of the darktable documentation.
The most important paragraph there is this one:
“The order of the pixelpipe is represented graphically by the order in which modules are presented in the user interface – the pixelpipe starts with a RAW image at the bottom of the module list, and applies the processing modules one by one, piling up layer upon layer of processing from the bottom up, until it reaches the top of the list, where it outputs the fully processed image.”
In this “processing chain” the results of hierarchically lower lying modules serve as a basis for the processing for higher lying modules.
This processing order is already predefined based on the function of the modules and each module is placed in the most appropriate position for the respective module.
However, there are situations where it sometimes makes sense to change the order of the modules in order to achieve a certain result.
In the first example in the video, I first used the contrast eualizer module to reduce the coarse local contrasts caused by the countless branches. I wanted to calm down the texture of this area so that the viewer’s eye is not too distracted.
In the second step, I wanted to add even a bit of diffusion to this area to enhance the effect and achieve an even softer look.
But since diffuse and sharpen module, with which I wanted to add this diffusion, is hierarchically lower than contrast equalizer module, I had to move it above contrast equalizer to apply this diffusion after the reduction of local contrasts with contrast equalizer.
In the second photo from the video, I first colored the highlights (the lights) with the rgb primaries module first and then used diffuse and sharpen module to mimic the diffusion filter. So, I had to place the diffuse and sharpen module over the rgb primaries module to apply the diffusion after the coloring. In this way, the lights got a red glow caused by the diffusion of the previously red colored lamps.
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After a long time an new episode again:
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Thank you, Boris!
Cool idea to show how to achieve that look with darktable by using different modules and at a very fine level of precision - instead of using one click solutions like LUTs or instant filters in other applications. I also prefer carving “pieces of art” out of raw files by “hand”.
It’s always a pleasure to follow your mouse pointer and learn a lot!
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Thank you for another great video — very subtle editing. It is interesting to see how the effect is the sum of minor edits.
A suggestion for a future video (feel free to ignore): I am curious how you would approach the “dark and moody orange” style. There are many versions on the net, I am thinking of those which are subtle, desaturate colors that don’t fit the harmony, maybe shift them a bit, but otherwise not overdrive saturation. Eg this one.
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This is actually relatively simple. You have to reduce the entire color spectrum to teal and orange and then reduce the saturation of teal.
This works excellently with the channel mixer. Here are the values:
Red channel:
Green channel:
Blue channel:
and saturation:
Result:
I can demonstrate something like this in the next episode.
Let’s wait a week to see if there are other requests, then I could make an episode to demonstrate it.
To all: So, if there are any other wishes, please let me know!!
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Hi Boris, I wait for your next video with eagerness as I am learning a lot about how to use the modules.
For the building, the first tendency is to make it bright and colourful, but you have shown how much more attractive it is when you move it into pastel shades. I would like to know how do you decide what kind of output will be best suited for a picture?. I am eager to learn from your thought process.
I have only one request, can you make the background dark, as sometimes, it is difficult to follow your white mouse movement on the grey background. Thanks
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Is pastel look always high key by definition?
Not necessarily. It is much more important that the colors and contrasts are muted. However, high key is very popular because it conveys a very dreamy, painterly mood.
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I know this can be tiring for the viewer, but a very important aspect of editing is the color and brightness environment. If the environment is dark, you also tend to edit the photos darker because the contrast is much too strong. Medium gray is optimal. That’s why my darktable interface is set this way.
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1000 posts milestone… and an treasure trove of information… Thanks for your contribution, time and effort sharing your talents with us all…
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I’d like to analyse and achieve effects similar to this gentleman starting from 5 m 29 s:
Well I can make the sky more cyan and less saturated, in another post Boris also answered me how to achieve something – I think – I see here done with the reds, but there is something more with this look.
Pictures in the video are not over saturated nor underexposed, yet they are – I don’t know 
– deep? Rich?
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They have a ton of contrast.
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