Editing moments with darktable

My wife is the same way with me any time I shoot. Thats why I save raw in one card and jpeg in another. She can have the jpegs immediately. And I personally think my camera jpegs are pretty decent. The photos I edit are the cream of the crop anyway.

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Same here. :see_no_evil:

Thank you for your sharing your expert knowledge so generously, the video was very useful (as were the previous ones).

One quick question: I remember Aurelien advising against a heavy use of the Perceptual Brilliance Grading section of the Color Balance RGB module in one of his video, because the underlying algorithm was not very robust. Indeed, I noticed that if you push the highlights slider a bit too much to the right when there are strong highlights in the image, large white blobs make a sudden appearance. Did you notice this and have any thoughts about it?

Itā€™s tied to all the gamut mapping I believe so when you push to the upper border you get white or there was an attempted fix but that went to black I thinkā€¦I think itā€™s known but not fixed yet

Yes, this is a known issue. I have written a bug report about it:

The temporary solution to this is to turn off filmic highlight reconstruction (quoted from flannelheadā€™s post):

ā€œ[ā€¦] Turn the threshold all the way up to 6 EV and transition slider all the way down to 0.25. At least with those settings I could no longer reproduce this sort of artefacts. [ā€¦]ā€

Great, the workaround does work. Thank you so much for your swift reply!

Thank you for this very informative video, I learned a lot

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New episode: Hue shift in highlights

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Great video Boris. This will be very useful esp for many new users of DT. I have one question. I notice that you donā€™t set the mask in rgb CB module, even just with the autopickersā€¦ would this not give you slightly better results for selected tonal adjustmentā€¦ So setting the white and grey contrast fulcums using the autopickers??

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Absolutely!

In this example I did not use it because I had good result immediately without these settings.

Where this can play a big role is for example when editing photos with sunset. With fulcrum and masks you can adjust the color transitions much better.

Maybe I should choose such an example at the beginning of the next episode and demonstrate it.

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Excellent tutorial as always!!!:+1::+1::+1::+1::+1:

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Ya out of habit I set them (white fulcrum and contrast gray) every time assuming it will give the best mask for shadows mids and highlights for a particular image and therefore make the adjustments selected more targeted. Its also quite amazing some times just tweaking mask middle gray fulcrum to the left or rightā€¦ I admit I donā€™t often play with the fall off slidersā€¦ Just the 3 mentionedā€¦ Your videos are always so very impactful it might be nice to see you explore this aspect and demonstrate how you would leverage that mask to enhance the adjustmentsā€¦

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Thanks a lot @s7habo. Your demonstration of hue shift in darktable and gimp (2:07 ff) and the following demonstration of hue preservation is excellent!

This video is a must watch not only for portrait photographers.

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Really nice, It took me some time to get what you explain here, hue shift really is a big one on the annoyance to get rid of.

I also really liked the other video you pointed to and how he highlight the fact that desaturation on highlight convey additional sensation of brightness when the coloured zone/object is already at max luminance.

thanks again !

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As always very nice video, thanks!

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Excellent tutorial thank you

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New episode: Use of masking options in the color balance rgb module

Raw file in the video was used from:

by Brian Poindexter (c)
Licensed under a (CC-BY-SA)

I didnā€™t try the processing additionally also with sigmoid, because I focused first on color balance module. I will do that in the next episode, since I wanted to introduce sigmoid briefly anyway.

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A very nice video tutorial :slight_smile: . I will forever be ā€œfood-processingā€ these flower images I take. Every year I do this I get new challenges.

One comment I would share is that one way to kind of bump up the overall brilliance, without losing too much petal surface texture detail, is to use the ā€œhome grown local contractā€ trick where one can use some kind of blur effect in subtract mode. Starting with an image that is a bit ā€œbrightā€, it will darken the image (or the affected masked areas if masks are used) as well increase surface details, after which you can use an instance of exposure with a raster mask to bring it back up to what suits the look. I used that technique with my own edit of this image and it worked really well.

Using sigmoid on this image, as another experiment, I was able to get close to my ā€œbestā€ edit (using a doctored version of filmic v6). I still like my original best, but the Sigmoid version I ended up with was almost as good.

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Thank you Boris.
You make it easy!

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Nice use case of the mask tab of RGB color balance, I never ventured there (is 2 tabs the max for me ?) so never really understood it but now I know whatā€™s itā€™s used for :smiley:

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