It may not have been exactly this but for sure because there is not the same level of desaturation then certain norms well create this in extreme highlights… I think the extreme luminance saturation and choosing a better norm or none plus the usual add more white rel exposure were some of the suggestions… no free lunch before people didn’t like all the desaturation and now you have to manage the side effects of the change…some of this was tangled up in some of the threads in highlight recovery
You can see some of this behaviour even in this photo…so just guessing but setting the exposure around 2 EV is not bad but pushes the white shirts…default filmic v6 with maxRGB will have strong bluish hue and not much contrast… you can select an area on the shirt with the color picker to monitor the channels…watching how they shift…
Switching to none or luminance as a norm and shifting the highlights slider and extreme highlights towards the shadows with extreme luminance also set to desaturate the highlights can produce nice white shirts…so somewhere on this spectrum might be what someone would want…
Corrected
Uncorrected …
No filmic
Secondly you can do it by using HLR in filmic instead…if you fix the blown highlights this way the norms don’t create the same issue… this is with max RGB but doing some HLR in filmic…
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Indeed the blue in trousers in the max RGB image is due to the fact that v6 has much less desaturation in highlights than v5. You can tune this a little with the extreme luminance saturation slider. Also, max RGB is expected to flatten the local contrast a little. Different norms can give vastly different results. With v6, also the no preservation mode can be used with confidence since it’s now actually hue-preserving, you just get plenty of that desaturation in highlights.
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Great point I forgot to mention that flattening that you see with that norm…there is a section in the new manual that touches on some of this…
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Since blown (usually magenta) highlights were also mentioned, I can’t help but describe what I often do with these:
- Disable the highlight reconstruction module
- Set white balance to taste
- Auto-tune filmic black and white point
- Choose a suitable norm (the no method works usually very good here, but the choice also depends on other things in the image)
- In the reconstruct tab, lower the threshold to 0.0 to -0.5 EV
- Set the gray <-> colorful details slider closer to gray until the magenta highlights disappear
- Adjust the bloom <-> reconstruct slider to taste depending on if I want smooth transitions or some details left in the highlights
- If still recovering some details is required, try the guided laplacians mode in highlight reconstruction module
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Yep, I’ve already created a loooong topic for filmic v6 and magenta highlights:
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I almost never change this. Perhaps I should.
Yes, I think with filmic v6 this may be more often necessary (but that’s why we have them).
I think for these photos (I’ve tried a couple more) preserve chrominance = no, luminance Y or RGB euclidean norm with extreme luminance saturation potentially turned up (so it re-introduces some colour in the highlights) works quite well.
Thanks for the link to the new manual. Is darktable 4.0 user manual - darktable the the same as darktable 4.0 user manual - darktable ?
I do the exactly the same although, if the highlights are not blown…I have been trying a lot of edits with no filmic and just instances of the TE… I find its hard not to lose highlight detail with filmic. the compression just blurs it… I do have a unity preset that I sometimes use and then rely on the tone eq to shape the image…
I think one is the working site maybe?? @elstoc can likely confirm the difference if any in the two…
When 4.0 is release, we’ll release a new URL for the docs. Both of what you’ve linked are the same thing at different URLs: the master branch of the docs repo.
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Going to have a play with this later, cause I’m curious to get to grips with this.
I noticed that latest commits to filmic (or something else in the last few weeks ) seems to suddenly removed the need to use highlight reconstruction for me.
In areas which are clearly indicated as sensor clipped (and thus are magenta with no modules enabled and lowered exposure ), i needed to enable highlight reconstruction to get rid of the magenta a few weeks back . Now i don’t often anymore , as if filmic sees that it’s extreme luminance and doesn’t preserve the magenta .
Like flannelhead said , only in some cases do i still get a bit of magenta and start toying with highlight reconstruction.
I don’t think so.
Certain norms (e.g. luminance Y) help, as does preserve chrominance = no.
I just had a quick try, and what - I think - already has been said in the topic:
Set preserve chrominance to ‘no’ and things appear right almost directly.
Whichever preserve-mode I pick, filmic v5 doesn’t do better (except ‘no’).
Luminance-Y comes close, but the trousers of the sailors get a bit blue, while they stay white / warmer with just set to ‘no’.
In the top-right between the leaves is also a bit of overexposed sky. When set to v6-‘no’ I don’t have to do anything to it, not even filmic-reconstruction. In other modes it’s magenta and I have to grab the highlight-reconstruct module (didn’t try filmic’s to be honest).
preserve-mode set to ‘no’ does make the highlights really ‘pop out’. The people in the middle-right with white shirts for example, they look really bright (blown out?). The captain with the full beard right of the tail of the fish, his beard also seems rather blown out. But changing preserve-modes doesn’t really bring it back. Toying around with the tone equalizer, you can bring the highlights down and the shadows up to lower the contrast of the scene before hitting filmic, but that might not be the look you’re after.
(although dragging tone-equalizer before exposure (so under it) and picking one of the ‘soft’ compression presets is not that bad actually).
‘max rgb’ really tries very hard to get any kind of color out of it. And if your highlights are really white (like the trousers here) it just turns them into some color that’s not really correct.
It’s not an easy one, I give you that. Makes me want to go back to some pictures and try some other preserve-modes :).
I posted a filmic v5 version (the 1st image, in fact), and I think it does a fine job out of the box. Try opening these in tabs, and switch between them:
ah, my dropdown boxes bug out with recent gtk versions, so once I click something it doesn’t always ‘stick’…
using the scroll wheel to go through modes is more reliable… filmic v5 with preserve-mode set to ‘no’ and filmic v6 (with no) are very very close, and both work well.
@flannelhead can you explain - to someone not knee-deep into color maths - why ‘preserve chrominance’ set to no is still hue preserving?
Am I correct in explaining it as 'it does not try to keep saturation, or ‘how much color’, but it does keep ‘which color’, by not causing color shifts?
So the trousers have some blue in them somewhere, but with preserve-chrominance to ‘no’ they are just so high in luminance that they appear white?
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Chrominance is the colour correlate of the norm. If the colour of the source is incorrect to begin with or one modifies one without the other, then one would end up with funky colours.
Sorry, English is not my mother tongue.
Webster’s defines correlate (noun) as
1: either of two things so related that one directly implies or is complementary to the other (such as husband and wife)
//brain size as a correlate of intelligence
2: a phenomenon that accompanies another phenomenon, is usually parallel to it, and is related in some way to it
//… precise electrical correlates of conscious thinking in the human brain …
darktable’s docs only mention chrominance to note that it’s not the same as chroma:
chroma is not short for chrominance, which is the color part of a video signal (the Cb and Cr channels in YCbCr, for example).
Those two don’t help me understand what you mean.