Thanks for the video, Boris! Professionally made and well demonstrated, as always.
I feel that adjusting the target white (from 100% to 150%) is more of a workaround, required because sigmoid’s curve converges asymptotically to 1, never quite reaching it. I mostly use filmic, but encounter something similar from time to time: even after auto-picking the white relative exposure, the histogram stays well below white, and there’s not much contrast in the highlights. What I do in such cases, if manually lowering the relative white exposure does not give satisfactory results, is tweaking local contrast, raising the highlights slider, while keeping an eye on the histogram. Maybe it would also work with sigmoid.
2 Likes
Thanks a lot @s7habo !
4 Likes
@Pascal_Obry thank you!
By the way, the current master version of darktable is super fast and very responsive. You and rest of the team seem to have properly polished and optimized it in the last months.
That’s awesome! 
15 Likes
I was wondering if this still applies now, or whether I should try a new automated workflow,
changing some steps or swapping to new modules. I tried the Filmic auto, and find that the greys are not included and that in the “look” part i wouldn’t allow me to go any further with the contrast as you suggest in your video: 1.6, because the lines already go to orange in the extremes at 1.1.
Could anyone refer me to any particular post, if there is one, more actualized?
Thanks in advanced all your videos are absolutely fantastic Boris!
If you switch from hard to safe in options → contrast in highlights / shadows, you’ll never get the clipped/reversed curve.
Extreme contrast with the hard setting:
With safe:
2 Likes
I might be misunderstanding a part of your question but if you are referring to the grey slider it has been hidden for many versions now. You can see the tick to enable it in the last screen shot shown by @kofa… if this is not at all what you mean you can ignore this…It was hidden because it was deemed better to set this with exposure.
1 Like
I was referring exactly to that, as was shown in this very video, so your explanation was absolutely right and helped me a lot. Kofa’s screen shot and explanation was very helpful too. This foro is amazing. Regarding the other questions, I just started watching the last episodes, so I get an idea of all the new modules and the workflow I could try to learn, as I followed some tutorials on dark table 8 or 9 years ago and a just realized I was completely out of date and I needed to learn so many new things. Thanks a lot!
2 Likes
I find often a decent start for exposure is to use the picker in the exposure module…it will use the whole image as a source and the default setting is 50%… If that isn’t good then I will adjust the selection to my subject of interest or a spot that I want to have in the right zone… finally I can manually bump it. Depending on the image of course but I often use exposure this way and if things are still a bit dark I try the relight preset in the tone eq…I find it often does a really nice job…and then I fine tune filmic or sigmoid if I decide to use them… but this is a very general approach and I just shoot things for memories at family events and on vacation so no targeted photography that might need a specific workflow…
3 Likes
Hi Boris and thanks a lot for all your hard and beautiful work. O used to follow a Spanish guy a long time ago, who talked about Dark Table, but leaved all the photography edits afterwards. You really inspired me again!
I was wondering if there’s any specific place I need to refer to in order to download the presets for this particular module (difuse and Sharpen) or any others too, as I if I’m not mistaken I remember you saying we could start by using those presets as a starting point. I can’t find any specific text around here or any specific quotation on the instructions of Dark table included the ones related to this module. And just in case, I need to add, that I don’t hace any presets on my module. I checked it…
Anyway, thanks for all this hard work it’s to say the least inspiring.
That module has quite a list of presets. You just click on the “hamburger” icon top right in the module header to expose them…this is also where your own will display when you start to save some…
1 Like
Thanks Prior for your reply. As you can see on this photo, I don’t have any presets in the hamburger bottom, apart form the ones that I just did my self. So I wonder, are there presets which I don’t have? and if so, is there somebody out there with the same problem? I copied some of the presets I watched in the videos so I can start to work from them, but sometimes Boris just applies the presets so I don’t have the chance to see the exact values of each parameters.
Hola,
If you’ve enabled this checkmark the defaults presets are hidden.
Greetings from La Habana, Cuba.
5 Likes
Hola Franklin!
That was it! Thank you so much, I hope this might help someone else in the future.
Muchas gracias y saludos.
3 Likes
Hello everyone,
I just wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude for the inspiring educational videos that have been shared in this community. They have been incredibly helpful in enhancing my photography skills!
I recently watched Boris’s video on Darktable, and I found it extremely useful. I’m particularly interested in the tone equalizer he used for the portrait minute 16. Could anyone please share what preset he applied? I’ve tried to replicate it myself to find the right parameters, but I have some doubts about whether it’s the same as the one he had predefined.
Thank you in advance for your help!
2 Likes
Video number???.. I just peeked back at min 16 in #84 and no use of the tone eq there …
I’m sorry for the misunderstanding! I thought that if I replied to a video specifically, it would appear the question related to that one. I was actually referring to video #79, specifically the part about the lady’s portrait. My apologies for any confusion.
2 Likes
As he doesn’t show the graph its basically impossible to tell…But the image gets overall brighter and the tones even out a bit so it could be something like this… or with a bit more extreme linear slope and then move the mask along with exposure compensation slider to target as needed but I am speculating …you could ask him…
1 Like
@priort estimated it correctly. I use inverted linear curve to lighten shadows and midtones without affecting highlights that much.
I have two versions of it, one with EGIF (exposure independent guided filter) and one with guided filter. Both filters can be selected in the masking tab under “preserve details”
With guided filter you can preserve a lot more detail in shadows, but you run the risk of creating halos in the hard transition between very dark and light areas.
This can be minimized with the sliders “smoothing diameter” and “edges refinement/feathering” in the masking tab.
8 Likes
Thank you very much for your responses. I continue to learn every day and feel stimulated and amazed by your generous and valuable contribution to this world.
I have saved both presets and I hope that with time and effort, I can start to be able to deduce the parameters intuitively as Priort has done.
Cheers!!
1 Like
Thank you very much for your explanation of using the Guided Filter in the Tone Equalizer. It can give wonderful results in conjunction with those sliders.
2 Likes