Hi, I’ve been editing my photos with Darktable for quite a while now, and I’m actually pretty happy with it so far. I mainly use two styles that I’ve created myself: one uses an inherited mask (which I mainly use for photos with people in them), and the other uses no mask at all (which I mainly use for landscape shots). But sometimes I wonder if there might be a better way to do this.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m often not sure whether certain modules should still be used or if there are better ones available now, and so on.
So here are my styles:
Color People.dtstyle (6.4 KB)
Workflow: I enter Haze Removal and mask the skin of people in there, several modules inherit the mask, the mask is inverted, so the edits in the skins and faces are not so heavy.
Color Landscape.dtstyle (5.5 KB)
For landscape photography, I do basically nothing after applying, just correct exposure and basic stuff.
What I’ve been doing differently since version 5.6.0 is that I no longer draw the masks for faces and skin by hand, I let the AI do it instead, which has been working really well so far
Hi @siatko that is a pretty difficult question to ask so broadly.
I work completely different and hardly use any style. I do use module presets a lot though.
What I would do in your situation is to enter a couple of play_raw entries. And then study carefully some of our interpretations you like best, to see if there is room for improvement in your styles and masking.
I’m sure there will be other users here - working much more the way you do - who might bring in interesting suggestions.
I suggest that you post some examples of your work in our Playraw section. Take a look at existing threads to get the hang of what to upload, and the required licence statement.
Others can then post their ideas of what they would do with the image, along with the XMP file of their edit. You can make duplicates of your image, and apply those XMP files. If what you see is “better,” or simply different with stuff you never thought of, you can browse the modules that they used and see what they did.
Otherwise, I don’t think your question can be answered.
eg. I wonder why you are using haze removal for portraits. But if I see an example, I might learn something.
Looks like you use the ‘sharpen’ module? I will suggest trying some presets from the ‘diffuse or sharpen’ module, namely the ‘sharpen demosaicing’ and ‘lens deblur’ ones. I like them, I rarely feel like they need tweaks.
I like the ‘set up mask and re-use it as a raster mask’ method. Haze removal’s very early, and everyone uses ‘as shot to reference’ white balance, so if your in-camera settings are auto, hues should be suitable for parametric masking. (If not, colour calibration can get the white balance neutral, then you can use something like another instance of colour calibration or rgb primaries to mask with hues)
Standard modules for me are exposure, tone equaliser, denoise, colour calibration, chromatic aberrations, DorS, contrast equaliser, colour equaliser, colour balance rgb, and AgX. Fits values to the display space, enhances local contrast, enhances colours.
I think anything more than those basics is very scene-dependent.
For me DT is about the individual user developing their own artistic and creative editing approach rather than being forced down a ‘correct’ pathway. I feel the playraw category would provide alternative processing in DT and other FOSS software for comparison.
For what it is worth here is the style that I am currently using for a lot of my images and images appearing in playraw. It is adapted from a style I downloaded from this forum so I don’t take credit for creating this. It is based on AgX and the AgX settings usually can be left alone to match the Fujifilm Provia look.
