I often end up fighting “neon green” plants in photos. It’s unnatural and can be distracting, especially when the plants are not the main subject. Of course, lighting, exposure and the biome itself are major factors.
There are a few tutorials on Youtube on how to get “DOPE MUTED MOODY GREEN TONES”. Of course some of the Lr modules are different and my attempts to follow in darktable don’t get the same look.
This particular tutorial includes a link to raw file, but it’s not mine so I’ll just link the youtube. If you can duplicate using the tutorial’s Raw, I guess just share the sidecar file.
Challenge: 1. Get muted green plants in darktable 2. Use as few modules as possible 3. Stick to scene-referred as much as possible
Color zones module is useful here, but I think it is not a recommended module anymore.
Here are two of my photos that you can also work with.
These things can be a bit subjective…one person might be happy with a green foliage and someone might think its neon…The CC module is good either with the channel mixer or try the color brightness and colorfulness tabs…
Usually you are adding in some blue and dropping chroma/saturation to get the dull leaves…
In contrast equalizer you reduce the coarse range of local contrast:
And then play with the sliders in color balance rgb. Master tab:
4ways tab:
Note - I did this with darktable version 4.0. Color balance rgb has a new color space in this version. Accordingly the results will look different in 3.8.
The results can then be transferred to the green from your photos with a mask. Of course you have to adjust the whole thing to the lighting conditions of your photos:
I am unable to download the raw files myself. However, I often use the color zones module to subdue the saturation of colours or enhance the saturation. It works well in my hands. Also in the filmic options tab, try changing the options for ‘preserve chrominance’ as this can have some interesting effects on how colors are displayed.
I don’t like using either color balance rgb or color calibration for this purpose because I usually want to change several ranges of colors (and that’s really a mess with multiple modules and parametric masks).
Right now I use an instance of of the lut 3d module as the last step in my pipe. You can create a LUT with GrossGrade.
Aurélien is also working on a new color equalizer module that will hopefully be helpful. Last time I checked it seemed less precise than color zones as you can not select the range of colors yourself.
I would add Its also so very easy to run parallel versions so you are not forced to upgrade. To be safe just turn off xmp writing for your test version and then you won’t overwrite your edits…Install in a 4.0 directory and point it to a 4.0 config directory and you should be good to go…There is really no strong reason to wait as many people seem that they feel they need to do…at least IMO
If your more comfortable with it I think it is fine for this purpose, ie targeting the foliage. It comes after filmic so it should be fine. I usually use colorbalance rgb for color tweaks as it will “sanitize” as AP says …the color…but I used to have a preset in CZ called muted greens ironically and it works nicely … hue shift and brightness and saturation down… I use it when I get the neon greens that are not natural IMO… But I also have a set of presets in color rgb for several colors and I sometimes use those too… Finally I have a couple in the channel mixer as well… I go on streaks where one seems to work best for a set of images so I keep using it until it doesn’t then I try the others or do a custom edit…
4.0.0 release notes mentioned something about this:
If modules are applied after filmic in the pipeline, they don’t benefit from this gamut mapping and rely on LittleCMS2 (if enabled) at the final export stage, which does not gamut map as it should, and probably never did
They are safeguard to help keep things accurate and in gamut but as long as you don’t push the modules hard after filmic you are fine and if you are going for a look and you get that look then really it means nothing…
