This is a beginner question. I dabble with darktable, but there is still a lot to learn.
Scenic workflow of darktable seems to be preferring color calibration module. I’m trying to understand the difference between color calibration and color contrast module.
So far, for my experiments, results with color contrast were more pleasing to me. I wanted to achieve similar results with the help of color calibration and color balance rgb module but have failed. I do get good results, sometimes better than when I try balance/calibration but color contrast seems to be solving that in one or two slider movements.
Wondering if it’s possible to get similar results? Under what conditions you would use one over other?
No expert here, but I think it should be possible in theory. However, the color contrast module is a blunt instrument (it just changes the slope of the a and b Lab curves), whereas the color calibration module is quite flexible and can produce much subtler changes.
However, I don’t see it in the list of modules to avoid, so I’d say that, for a given picture, if it does what you need, just go with it.
Color contrast is a kind of chroma boost in Lab. Usually, chroma is the radial distance between a color and white. Increasing chroma means pushing that color farther away from white at constant hue, aka make it more colorful. The thing color contrast does is it does not push it at constant hue in the radial direction, but it pushes along a and b directions independently. That will change hue as well.
Color calibration mostly defines where white is, which has nothing to do with chroma.
There is no way you can reproduce the color contrast effect with any of the RGB stack. The closest you can get is with the chroma setting in color balance RGB, but it will always be at constant hue. I’m not sure what the color contrast is designed for in the first place, and I see no use to a non-hue-preserving kind of chroma boost.