Hello everyone,
I’ve gone on a quest to get the best possible pictures out of my Fairphone 3 before thinking of moving on to a proper camera.
What I do for now:
- Use the Open Camera App to shoot raw DNGs
- Import the DNGs on darktable
- Learn all I can about white balance, color grading and so on, play around
- Print that stuff and give it to my friends.
Where did the colors go, though?
Here is an DNG, as produced by the phone and freshly imported in darktable, with the usual set of automatic settings (white balance, filmic rgb, exposure…):
Pretty flat, huh? It pales in comparison to the vivid colors of the JPEGs produced by the Open Camera App (or by the standard android app):
(but there’s waaaaaayyy too much sharpness)
Should I push the saturate button?
What I like with Darktable and all those rants by Aurélien Pierre, is the scene-referred workflow, where we avoid as much as possible to lose data.
I tried playing around with the color balance rgb module, to increase the chroma and avoid clipping, but the result isn’t so convincing to me.
Or I can be a complete noob, crank to the max the saturation button of the contrast brightness saturation module, and it does yield something comparable to the phone app:
But the clipping indicator isn’t quite happy with this, I’ve got a red alert all over those flowers.
My questions
- What am I missing here?
- Should I reasonnably expect such vivid colors with such a workflow (phone-dng-darktable), without losing nuance?
Feel free to check out the photos by downloading the DNGs, JPEG and darktable XMP files
These photos are not worth much, but by all means, use them, have them, along with Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
