Hi, does anyone know any good learning resources (text or video) for darktable, which are based on objective criteria like checking scopes (RGB parade or histogram).
All the resources that I see (on YouTube): the author does some random moves of sliders, says “That looks good to me” and continues further, without any motivation, without referring to scopes or some objective criteria. I understand that photography is a creative process, but as with music or video there must be some objective almost-purely technical reasons for doing things. For example, just a couple of tutorials that I have watched, have all the pixels within the histogram, and they always somehow stay within the histogram in spite of all the processing, although in my experience, changes always lead to underclipping or overclipping.
(If somebody speaks German and have read the book on darktable from Rheinwerk, please let me know )
better don‘t expect such resources to be useful - darktable isn’t focused on editing by numbers. So if you want to learn about RGb Parade or histogram each tool sepecific and tool agnostic documentation won’t give less information regarding darktable …
If you’re thinking about their darktable 4 book, the benefit over the official darktable documentary is a proper german and illustrated description of the modules and a workflow centric structure.
But also not about editing by numbers
If you want to get a technical understanding then read whatever description or watch explanation videos you can find in the internet provided by the authors of modules. you might have a look here: Understanding of filmic rgb - #4 by MStraeten
One man’s random slider move is another man’s deep experience!
For me, Boris’s videos are the “reference manual.” As such documents tend to do, he regularly goes beyond what I am capable of understanding. Which means there is more to be got out of them.
As the saying goes, “other products are available.” As you will know as you have already explored youtube. Someone who goes though each module, referring to the manual, is Bruce Williams.
I’m also curious as to clipping, although I only do something about it if the pic looks as if it needs it. Hoping to hear from one of our expert members, but the clipping indicator is configurable, and I think that the default settings show all clipping
Indeed, Boris is an expert and that’s why it is difficult for me to follow, as I am a novice. This is exactly why I look for something more objective, where it is clearer to understand the motivation, why and what changes are done.
@Dmitry But photo editing is almost always highly subjective. Just have a look at the processing section, and some play-raws (I assume here that most of the posts there are what the author sees as a good rendition of the scene).
@Thad_E_Ginathom “Clipping” can have two meanings: you have raw clipping, where the sensor was saturated, and there’s soft clipping, where your edit pushed some pixels beyond what can be shown. The latter can be corrected, the former is often irrecoverable.And I agree that some clipping can be acceptable (in any case, getting a light source not clipped causes too many other problems…)
First thing you can learn from Boris videos: it’s not the rgb parade or a scope etc. that defines a good image. It just depends on your intention.
So try to learn to train your imagination of a result and then to use the tools that support that intention.
Have a look at the playraw section: there‘re plenty of technically correct editings of the same raw that are totally different… and not all of them I’d rate as an appropriate result - obviously based on my point of view
Photography is based upon looks not numbers. That is my objective respectful opinion. Seriously when I edit I don’t even look at the histogram any more. The only check I do in darktable is raw over exposure clipping indicator. That is because I usually bracket and with my Canon R7 I find the brightest image without clipping of the highlights is the best image for me to edit. So the image below is the brightest of a series of bracketed shots, but because it is clipping slightly I would use the second brightest in the bracket.
It is difficult to start developing your own pictures. It is easy to get lost or to get disappointed with your results. It takes hundreds of hours to get better. So keep courage!
I’m fairly experienced in photography but only a beginner in darktable. And it takes me month to get more or less proficient and independent. It took a lot of youtube video’s - I had to watch many more then twice - to get a grasp. What -besides the videos and manual - did help me a lot was making my own tab of preferred modules.
I can imagine you experiencing it as such. As far as I am concerned Boris Hajdukovic often makes an explicit kind of analysis what he wants improved in a picture. And explains quite often what he does. Problem with darktable (and other software) there are multiple ways to achieve something. It’s quite like writing a book, the writer wants to tell a story and is completely free how (s)he does so.
It is difficult to look at a dull picture and imagine what it might look like and get aware of why you want it in ‘this or that’ special way. It takes a lot of experience. And then you’ll still have to find the way to achieve your goal.
Fastest way to improve here is to show us your picture’s you are working on - the raw + xmp file. You’ll immediately get lot’s of comment and advice. Another nice way is to pick up pictures from the ‘play-raw’ discussions and develop them yourself, together with picking up de xmp’s of other contenders - you’ll learn a lot and fast.
So I think you’ve made - again - the right step to ask as you did! And now you know it will simply take you hundreds of pictures to find your way. Learning how to walk had nothing to do with gravity’s laws… Please show your pictures, tell us what you want to achieve and what you’ve tried to do. Other like me will be happy too and learn along with you.
For future reference, after trying out the “beta”Agx module that @kofa has been working on and that should hopefully be added to Darktable master in six months or so, it makes processing so much easier and more intuitive. There’s a long thread about it on pixls, you’ve probably seen. Unfortunately, the module might change further before it is officially adopted, so any edits done now using it, might break with the final release, though I might continue to use it and just export the edits as jpegs.
You can also watch Lightroom tutorials and try to adapt them to darktable. I think they are generally more photography oriented and have clearer objectives (in term of styles and colors for examples).
It might help to mention some of the modules you are adjusting that cause these clipping problems.
I have a possibly unique approach to my editing of my images. Many DT users adjust the exposure module to place the midtones in the centre of the histogram, however, I ignore the histogram and the shadows in the image. I first adjust the exposure module to give me the best highlights exposure. This is often the sky in a landscape picture. After that DT has a great selection of tools to recover my shadow details. These include tone equalizer, shadow and highlights, color balance rgb, and other modules.
BTW, I use Sigmoid rather than Filmic as my tone mapper. I prefer the colors and results straight out of the box with sigmoid while filmic requires more user input and can very easily result in clipping if the settings are not ‘correct’. Sigmoid has less clipping issues in my view.
When we just talk of clipping also you need to be sure that you have checked your display profile…you can do this by setting your display profile to linear rec2020 if that is what your histogram is set to. Or at least make them the same Ie display and histogram)…now do you see a difference in gamut warning mapping…if so then your display profile is one of those that due to the position of the display profile in the pipeline it is likely interferring with the gamut warning overlays …Note your image won’t look good when you do this but it confirms that your display profile is not impacting the true gamut warnings for your selected histogram colorspace. This is only for testing so you switch it back. Then as some have mentioned if using the overexposure for gamut it has selected modes that will display warnings based on that parameter and the selected histogram profile. So you need to check and make sure you didn’t make a change that you forgot about… If instead you use the gamut warning control then it uses the softproofing profile as its reference so again you need to confirm that you have your profiles set to show gamut for what you expect.
@Terry, quite often clipping problems are induced by the Haze Removal and Local Contrast modules. What I do not understand the most is that sometimes only some color channel goes outside the boundaries, and I am puzzled if this must be fixed or not.
I also use Sigmoid and could not get any good results with Filmic. One question: is it normal to adjust settings manually in Sigmoid for raw images?
I am on macOS, and it says “Color-LCD” for the profile. I have tried to set it to Display P3, Adobe RGB, and sRGB, and I cannot see any difference at all.
I am so “obsessed” with histogram and other scopes as they are in principle should give objective information that do not depend on my viewing conditions (for example, I have to adjust the monitor brightness during the day; I do not have any studio environment, etc.) So, I think when the histogram shows clipping, it is not important what color profile is set?
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