I just learned this morning, to my surprise, that I can shoot with film simulation set to, say, Acros, in my X-T30, getting a b&w image on the camera LCD (which makes focus peaking much easier to use) but after ingesting into dt I get, happily, the image I expected if I had set film simulation to ‘STD’.
What information, from where, does dt use to decide it can ignore the film simulation setting? I looked in the image using EXIF and could not find anything relevant. How does the process work?
Film Simulations in Fuji cameras are for jpegs only, not raw data. So it effects the jpeg thumbnail in the raw file, but not the raw data itself.
Oh, that’s simple enough - thanks. Now it makes sense.
If you want to approximate the Fujifilm emulations, you can find some links on by blog:
As an addition, this is basically for all camera’s a given.
A raw file captures the data very early in the pipeline inside of your camera , to capture as little processing as possible (over simplifying it a bit).
So any processing your camera does is not in your raw file (the basic ‘look’ of your camera , white balance , creative effects , …).
Some settings (like Sony picture profiles , or Fuji DR modes ) can affect the shooting parameters and thus affect the raw file (like fixating the iso to a certain value , or underexposing on purpose , etc…). But this is all camera dependant and internal working stuff.
Basic rule or thumb is that a raw file captures what your sensor produces , which means iso and exposure has effect. But white balance and ‘tone’ and everything after is not recorded . So that requires doing this manually , but gives lots of choice ).
White balance is ‘recorded’, but not ‘applied’ most of the time. So you get a better starting point but you are free to change the white balance however you want after the shot.
Not quite in my case: White balance, style, scene mode settings, etc., are recorded in the metadata and applied to the (embedded) jpg, but not applied to the raw data. That’s how some of the raw developers provided by the camera brand can reproduce the style used while shooting. darktable doesn’t use most of that information, except for a few things like white balance, ISO setting and exposure compensation.
There is some support for black&white images (as you shoot with your filmstyle) in darktable,
in preferences->processing you will find detect monochrome previews
If you switch that to on your import will take longer but those images get an internal tag. That tag can be
darktable->mode->monochrome orYeah, what i said. With semantics about what is in metadata and what is in the pixeldata.
But to explain it to a beginner , what comes from the sensor is written in the raw data. And what affects this is your exposure including iso. The rest is stored somewhere as metadata , but most software won’t do much with it except the official manufacturer software.
I use Stuart Sowerby’s Fuji LUTs (the 3dl LUTs, not the dtstyles).
They work well. Reduce contrast in Filmic to get the contrast to look right, or apply them in color blending mode only to leave tonal editing to Darktable.
Edit: previously, I recommended to use the PNG LUTs, but these seem to lead to a posterizing effect, clearly seen as a comb-like pattern in the histogram. Use the 3dl LUTs instead, which do not exhibit this behavior.
What you said was
And that begs the question how darktable would be able to use the camera whitebalance setting and such…
Or how the official manufacturer’s software could apply the effects.
Simplifying things is good, oversimplifying isn’t.
Well, on balance, I think I am gratified to have asked the question and got a simple answer which I understand. Moreover, it is thought-provoking to learn how much deeper this question could be answered.
So much to learn ; so little time.
Hmm, that looks interesting. Thanks for the guidance. I think I’ll experiment with that a little.
Should this be ‘darktable->module->monochrome’ ?
I can’t see the option ‘darktable->mode’ as an option in collections in my version of 3.8
Tags involving module are added to images automatically if the given module was applied to the photo. So no, I don’t think so.
Have you tried enabling the setting in preferences and importing some images, to see if those newly imported photos hot tagged with the mode indicator?
No - it’s a tag. That tag is created (after detect monochrome previews is switched on)
refresh exif found in “selected images” metadata tab.