Sorry to go off topic, but can you give a little info as to how this would be done? I often need this, and I’m a noob.
Let’s deal with that in a new topic. @paperdigits, could you please split the question into a new topic?
Try the Tone Equalizer module with the preset Relight: fill in.
Would you be able to share an image so that we can try different ways. The tone equalizer will help brighten shadows as already suggested. The shadow and highlights module is another module worth considering as is the color balance RGB module. The color balance module has brightness sliders for shadows, midtones and highlights as well as global.
As a photographer I do not believe software can truly imitate or replace the careful use of fill flash (or reflectors). But the ability to recover dark shadows was like a silver bullet when it first appeared in PhotoShop many years ago. Now all good programs have something similar.
I’m going to go ahead and say that “emulating” a fill flash is not possible.
you can use a drawn mask - perhaps with the assistance of some parametric selection - to target areas and lift the exposure with the exposure or tone equalizer modules, but I’d call that a pseudo fill flash effect at best.
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Are you saying that I can’t think of it as a fill flash, I must think about what a fill flash would have done to various surfaces, and manually makes those adjustments? I can understand if that is the case.
I’ll look at the tone equalizer with that preset.
I’d be glad to have any reasonable imitation (or emulation or whatever you want to call it) of a fill flash. I’m a rank amateur at all aspects of this stuff, and I don’t have a really sharp eye for any of this, it’s probably not going to take a lot to vastly improve where I’m at now.
I’d appreciate any pointers that anyone cares to give.
more or less, I think we understand each other. Essentially all our various exposure adjustment modules in darktable can only raise or lower the effect of the lighting that was in the scene when the photo was taken. “Emulating a fill flash” to me means getting to a result you might have got, had you had a fill flash with you when you took the photo. If that’s the result you want you’re basically going to have to paint that light in with dodging and burning techniques, which is non trivial.
if you just have some dark areas in your photo you really wish you could see better, provided there’s some information there you should be able to raise that easily enough with the tone equalizer, or a masked instance of the exposure module. This however will look nothing like the result you would get had you taken the shot with a fill flash, which is what I was trying to make clear.
I’m going to borrow an example from this video, and hopefully you can see that global adjustments to the image taken without a flash aren’t going to perfectly replicate the image on the right. Light creates shadow and together they create shape, and adding additional light sources will most likely change those relationships completely. Unfortunately a few sliders can’t account for those differences.
