I’m glad you like my videos. However, they are not meant as tutorials but rather as a demonstration of how I use darktable. The idea behind it is to show people how to achieve certain results and to prove that darktable can achieve the same high quality results as proprietary software.
I find a general step-by-step tutorial very difficult - and this applies to all photo processing software - because there are different tasks and user cases that differ so much from each other.
But, if you have a concrete example of what you would like to achieve, you can provide us with the corresponding image and I will be happy to give you a step-by-step description of how I would process it with darktable.
The sound is really good for me. I want to make myself clear. I always made retouching photos with Photoshop. Sometimes Lr, when the number of my photo sessions needs a bit light up (Using the spot removal tool and the adjustment brush). So I decided to use the features of Darktable, specifically a basic retouch with all corrections. I really want to surprise myself by the quality. Thank you.
I have occasionally dealt intensively with the subject of retouching. Until recently, my approach was to first do the basic work in Darktable and then the actual retouching in GIMP.
There are very good tutorials for retouching with GIMP. I would like to highlight one of @patdavid tutorials because it has been excellently described and where the techniques have been used to take retouching to a whole new level:
Recently, darktable also offers a retouching module that allows you to use this technique in darktable as well. I haven’t used it yet because I’m not currently processing portraits, but if you could provide us with a sample portrait, this could be a very good opportunity to try the module, especially as I’m already familiar with the wavelets technique from GIMP.
So, my suggestion is, you select a portrait that you have already processed with Photoshop from your collection (as raw file and your processing result) and I will take the time to try to reproduce your result in darktable and describe my approach to you.
Professional retouchers do not use the technique described in that tutorial from clippingpath. With this blurring technique you only loose details on the skin.
They usually use ‘frequency separation’ which makes two layers of the image, one blurred without details and one on top of it above.
As @s7habo already mentioned, Darktable has got a decent retouch module. This uses ‘wavelet decomposing’, which is similar to frequency separation but with more than just two layers.
If you need training material for retouching I recommend Model Mayhem, there is a sub-forum for portrait retouching with many RAW files and work from professionals. https://www.modelmayhem.com/forums/thread/76
@s7habo I can’t remember exactly which video I saw you clone out some color spots using the residual layer of the wavelet decompose (I think it was a gimp video), but I’ve just done exactly that with the new retouch module in darktable to cure some fitler vignetting, and it worked amazingly well! What an ingenious idea. I’d never have thought of that myself in a million years.
I would love to but they are very big (450MB total) and at the moment I don’t have a way to upload them anywhere that they can be available to all people.
Great videos, Boris! Have subscribed to your channel.
I’ve volunteered to do a tutorial in my photography club about image editing using darktable, so inspired by your videos, I may do something similar. Easier for me to just show a video tutorial, rather than standing up in front of the group
