My 2c after watching the video… I think it’s mostly a little local contrast boost plus more importantly a tone curve with a little kick up in the far shadows - a raised black level so as to speak.
Not sure if there’s some subtle colour stuff happening as well. Might just be a tone curve with no colour preservation
I quite like to loose highlight detail in some cases. Sometimes I feel like Popsys overdoes it but often I have really liked it too. This recent slightly random shot is an example. Obviously this is not a landscape image - which perhaps makes comparison invalid - but still, I like the style. Incidentally, this is just the result of pushing exposure and sigmoid contrast, then heavily tapering the highlights in tone eq to make the rolloff gentle instead of almost clipping. (Obviously colour stuff happening too)
Yes, that’s the missing piece of the puzzle for me. Looking at old photos we have at home, it looks like reds fade faster than blues, but all pigments appear to fade a bit. I have been trying to
push target black in sigmoid, eg to 2%,
add some red attenuation (eg 40%),
add a generous exposure (+1.5–2 stops)
add some contrast in sigmoid
This can be overdone to show what happens to a faded photo print left out in the sun for a year then dialed back for a subtle effect.
I just watched this Popsys video. It’s a bit of an ad for Luminar Neo really, but he makes a good point about physical filters on the camera being destructive editing tools.
But I also like to watch these videos to see how I would replicate the effects in Darktable.
So, his use of the awfully named “Mystical” tool in Luminar Neo is similar to something I’ve been doing for a couple of years now. It is basically applying a soft contrast to the image to create a dreamy effect. As usual with Darktable, there are several ways of achieving this:
One way is to move the far left node in Contrast Equalizer up. This increases contrast in the coarsest details of the image, and with the default radius, it softens edges, creating a “dreamy” effect. Doing the same with the far left node in the Chroma tab also increases saturation, which James does with the shadows in the video.
Another way is to use a blurring module and blend the blur with Multiply, then adjust opacity and fulcrum. I tend to use Censorize, but it can also be done with Contrast Equalizer, Diffuse or Sharpen, Blurs, Low Pass, etc. basically anything that blurs.
Diffuse or Sharpen can also add soft contrast if you get the central radius and radius width to act upon coarser details. I have spent hours trying to dial this in consistently, but this module really doesn’t make it easy, so I rarely use it now.
For his use of the “Glow” tool, we have Bloom in Darktable. Not much more to say on this module, but it can work very similarly to the Luminar tool, albeit with fewer options. You can also use Haze Removal with negative values, then mask it to restrict the effect to the highlights, to add a hazy glow to the image. There are also numerous ways to add an Orton effect, which the manual mentions for several modules.
Finally, for his use of the “Matte” tool, this can be done in several modules because it essentially involves raising the black level. There seems to be two interpretations of “matte”: either it has high contrast or low contrast. But the one constant is that the blacks are lifted.
One of the easiest ways to do this is with Sigmoid, where you increase/decrease the contrast slider, and then just raise the target black slider. Putting both these sliders to maximum can work surprisingly nicely for some images.
For more control, I use the Color Balance RGB module. The Global offset slider is increased to raise the black level, and then contrast is adjusted using either the contrast slider or shadows/highlights sliders in Brilliance (or both). Finally, saturation can be tweaked, with lower saturation in the highlights, and more in the shadows creating a nice effect.
I had to look up this, so for others who also may not have such knowledge present:
The soften module (display referred) is described in the manual as “a near-copy of Orton’s analog process into the digital domain”. In addition an Orton effect is mentioned for the censorize and diffuse or sharpen modules.
EDIT: censorize: “Combine a simple blur with a multiply blend mode to create a realistic bloom (Orton effect)” d or s: “use the bloom preset”
Thanks @EspE1
The Soften module is another example of how Darktable has changed over the years. Whereas dedicated modules used to exist for specific tools, e.g. Soften, Monochrome, Bloom, Vignette, Split Toning, etc., the scene-referred workflow now tends to incorporate those effects as presets rather than dedicated modules.
I actually enjoy the old way of dedicated modules, and I still use the display-referred tools quite often. As long as they aren’t pushed too far, they work very well.
