How to replicate Lightroom calibration tool in Darktable

I thought the same and tried it last night on a colorchecker image but I dont’ feel like it works like the LR hue changes… in LR moving the red slider creates a nice deep orange and I could not get that effect on the color checker blending to the red channel and rotating hue…I don’t have LR to check though…I think there are similar sliders in the Adobe Profile editor… I might look but that’s off topic

It probably won’t achieve exactly the same effect, but it is as close to it as I know how inside darktable. That said, two thoughts:

Lightroom’s hue slider is restricted. With the red slider you can go towards magenta, or towards orange, for example. In colorbalance RGB you can rotate the hue 360°. That means that small changes have a big effect. If you want finer control, adjust the opacity of the module.

The three channels do different things between programs. To achieve the teal and orange look wirh LR’s camera calibration, you need to tweak the blue channel, and in darktable it is the red one.

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Actually, I think the colors in your example are quite unnatural. This is what I get with a quick & dirty edit of your first JPG with the modules “color calibration”, “tone equalize” and “color balance rgb” in darktable.


A7305857.jpg.xmp (4.9 KB)

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Thank you @anon16817310 ! I’ve been trying hard to replicate the effect, it’s closer but it’s hard, a lot of sliders to move around, and the RGB Module with that mask isn’t replicable for other photos, I would have to create it each time I want to do a similar edit… Even creating a style and copying it can have undesired effects because I believe it builds on top of whats in the photo.

The number of sliders is the same. LR has 3 for hue and 3 for saturation. Darktable has the 3 in the colorfulness tab of color calibration, and 1 hue slider per colorbalance RGB module, with the workaround I suggested. The other sliders in the colorbalance module do other things, and unless you know what you are trying to do, I wouldn’t recommend tweaking them using the red/green/blue blend modes.

If you want a neutral base to start (like LR), you can create a style, so that the three colorbalance modules are automatically applied in the right blend mode, but no other settings changed. That way is only annoying to set up once, and you can experiment with each picture until you get the hang of it. Then make styles with your most common parameters.

One more bonus tip: if the hue slider is too sensitive, and changes are unpredictable, reduce the opacity of the module. That should let you make more precise adjustments.

If you want to learn more about darktable, I recommend the manual, and a couple YouTube channels: a dabble in photography, and Aurelien Pierre’s.

Hello,
I’m still strugling to achieve the same results on Darktable that I can easily pull off in Lightroom. Please see here one photo edited in Lightroom, using as well the color calibration module. How can I achieve a pretty similar result on Darktable? (I’ve tried using the color RGB module, as suggested before, but to no avail)
A7307795.ARW (23.9 MB)

Here is the version with darktable. The sliders in the “R” and “breitness” tabs in a new instance of the color calibration module were used:

grafik

grafik

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And here is another version as described above but with sigmoid instead of filmic…

grafik

…and additionally with Tone Equalizer for brightness…

grafik

…and contrast equalizer for sharpening…

grafik

…to get even closer to your version:

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Great job Boris! (as usual :wink:)
I find this part of CC very powerful, both creatively and for matching to jpgs too. It does take a little practice though.

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On the other hand, you only need to master this one module and with it you can replace half of all other sliders in 90% of all other “professional” photo editing software. And that, in turn, speaks volumes about sales strategies. But don’t even get me started on that topic… :wink:

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:+1: :slightly_smiling_face:

I know its a bit off topic but it was interesting when I looked at the skin tones I thought they looked a bit off and I know this was a call for an edit match to a DT function never the less I found it interesting… the edited version provided by the poster gives “Salmon” skin tones…

Check out Dt with only exposure and filmic with auto white/black (v5 set to no…my preferred version) … and I must say this looks nicer to me. I know the query here was to match some LR tweak… never the less check out the reported color… “Average Caucasian Skin” . I found this amusing esp since there was no color grading added at all and at least in the past there were often many complaints about skin tones coming from DT processing…

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Thank you very much!
Could you explain how can i go about it using this module? I’ve tried to replicate your results creating a new instance of color calibration module, and the mentioned sliders, but the results are not like yours (they look more redish).

Which version of darktable are you using?
Did you change anything else?
Can you please include your sidecar xmp file here so I can take a look at it.

Here is a short video how I did it. I entered the same values and did not change anything else:

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Thank you!
I’ve updated DT and was able to do the same :slight_smile:
Nonetheless the output is more diffuse than the pretended one. Could you tell me how can I learn how to use the calibration module so that I can easily pull off some good results? Is there any recomended tutorial? Im a beginner in DT and just want to achieve some good results, quickly, Im no advanced user and in that sense Lightroom is very intuitive.
Thanks!

You need to understand how the channel mixer works. These are the R G and B tabs in the color calibration module.

I have two episodes on youtube about it:

Channel mixer is not only used in darktable.

Accordingly, there are many other videos and tutorials about it on the internet. This is one of the very important tools for color manipulation (color corrections and color grading), with which you can achieve a lot without having to access other tools.

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Boris has provided his and there are very very many others as its a universal tool…so you can look to videos using GIMP Photoshop Affinity photo… Dave on his InAffinity YT channel has done a few… @nwinspeare Nicolas does some nice video’s he might have some content in his selection with coverage as well

Good information on channel mixer also here:

It took me so much fiddling (and a tip from the 3D LUT Creator Facebook page) to figure this out, but I’ve finally managed to put together a spreadsheet that can calculate Lightroom Calibration panel slider settings from a 3x3 RGB channel mixer matrix (and vice versa). The only thing I’m still not sure about is whether the panel in Lightroom is applying the Calibration matrix to the camera RGB values, the computed XYZ values (after the .DCP forward matrix) or the ProphotoRGB values of Lightroom’s internal working space.

Just plug in either a matrix or Lightroom calibration slider settings in the green boxes and you’ll get the corresponding data in the red boxes.

Hope that helps someone!

Lightroom Calibration Calculator.zip (6.5 KB)

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Good job! Haven’t tried it yet, and not that useful for me TBH, but I’d wondered if this could be done. :+1:Would be very handy just to learn about it, apart from anything else,