Well I think the thread title says all. i would like to save a style which treats sky in a special way. Therefore, I would like to save a combined drawn and parametric mask on the exposure module into a style, but haven’t found a way to do that. I always have to renew the drawn part when applying the style.
I was told before that saving drawn masks is not possible, as I wanted to have a custom, scene-referred vignetting preset with a circular shape mask.
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That’s sad, but I expected this answer. Have you found a workaround?
Unfortunately not - whenever I need scene-referred vignetting with lots of controls, I just make a new Color Balance RGB instance and make the mask manually.
For me being efficient is very important, because when I edit pictures for my self (not for fun on PlayRAW), I have to edit quite a big mass of RAWs. So having an efficient workflow speeds things up a lot, drawing a mask everytime anew is not what I call efficient. Any way, if there is no workaround, I have to live with that.
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External raster mask can be saved in a style, but not combined with a parametric mask, as far as I know … Perhaps still usable in some wise way. For vignetting?
I want this, too!
I’ll actually look into the new external raster masks. It’s a bit of an odd technique, but I won’t complain if it works.
I hope a developer can explain why a drawn mask can’t be part of a style or preset. I presume there is good reason. Maybe because image dimensions might change between images that the style or preset is being applied to. I just tested and noted that I couldn’t even save a drawn mask in a preset.
That is actually logical.
With a drawn mask you mask a certain area that only appears in that particular photo.
A style is used for photos with different content where it makes no sense to have a drawn mask for an area that does not exist in these photos.
For photos with similar content, you can copy and paste history stack into other photos. The drawn mask will also be copied.
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In this case, a custom vignetting mask (or sky mask for Popanz) seems like a rare scenario where it makes sense. Otherwise, as you said, yeah… it’s not necessary to save a drawn mask
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Maybe it would make sense to exclude handdrawn masks, but give the possibility to include masks like graduated, ellipse…
But yes I think Boris is probably right, that this is the explanation. And it somehow makes sense in the end.
So I will use further on the graduated density module to get where I want, even so I prefer the results with the exposure modules plus the possibility to bend the graduation line.
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I believe (I did this a long time ago and things may have changed) that you can create a module preset (i.e. vignette) with a mask. You can then create a style with the module set to the preset. You may have to turn the mask on again, but you shouldn’t have to redraw it.
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Hi Bill,
this appears not to work. I tried creating a vignette preset for exposure and it didn’t translate when I applied it to another image as the mask was known. I then tried making a style using the vignette and again it didn’t work.
It is not the end of the world that I ned to create a vignette for each image, so I will live with it and not complain.
I noticed this last year and created an issue: Masks are lost when used in styles · Issue #17447 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub
It looks like this will be fixed at some point.
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