Working within a scene-referred workflow, what would the darktable equivalents be for these “Basic” settings from Lightroom? Specifically, whites, blacks and clarity.
I’ve been using color balance rgb for vibrance, shadows, highlights and saturation adjustments.
In darkroom I just create my own manage module layouts and include the modules I want in the grouping that I want. THis is all personal taste how it is setup. Another great feature of DT.
EDIT: some people like the quick access panel for what you are suggesting.
Good question, Mike.
I use the sigmoid scene-referred workflow, set in the preferences, so my list of equivalents will be partly related to that.
Temperature and Tint = Color calibration for correction, RGB primaries global tint for creative shifts.
Exposure = exposure 
Contrast = contrast slider in sigmoid
Highlights, shadows, whites and blacks = tone equalizer. Also can use the brilliance sliders (small tweaks) and 4 ways tab in color balance rgb can be useful too
Clarity = local contrast, maybe diffuse and sharpen with a local contrast preset
vibrance and saturation = color balance rgb.
This happens to be pretty close to my main list of modules!
That’s interesting. I never thought of the tone equalizer for adjusting whites and blacks, rather just Highlights and shadows along with the color balance rgb module.
I think that I would need to see a demonstration or perhaps an explanation of how the four would be used within the tone equalizer module to better understand how each would be applied.
I must confess that it’s been a long time since I used Lightroom!
I thought I remembered whites and blacks being much the same as highlights and shadows, just, well, more so. I feel I may have made a wrong assumption there?
Tone eq does have a lot of flexibility, especially if you use more than one instance.
Well, I wonder if blacks and whites as used in Lightroom are actually something that is to be taken into account (needed to be adjusted) within scene-referred workflow.
Quite likely not… at any rate I very rarely need to adjust them. 
Edit: thinking further, as in a scene-referred workflow, everything is based or anchored to middle gray, not either ‘end’, black and white don’t really have a fixed definition.
When I need to do that, I’ll use the simple tone curve preset in tone equalizer and adjust the end points to set white and black as desired.
Hi Mike, if you really like to work with the whites and black adjustments you might prefer the way Filmic works instead of Sigmoid. It would be worth a look. I also do a lot of my contrast, vibrance and saturation adjustments in the color rgb module. DT offers so many choices of where and how to tackle contrast.
I describe LR as the automatic car and DT as the Lamborghini. LR’s strength is its simplicity with just a few sliders to produce an OK picture. DT’s strength is the range of artistic options to produce a work of art.
I use the local contrast module a lot with my edits. It is similar to the clarity slider in LR. The diffuse or sharpen module has local contrast presets but they produce a different look and may or may not suit your needs.
Terry, isn’t so much that I want to work with whites and blacks. Relating to scene-referred, does darktable use blacks and whites in the same way as Lightroom and if so where? Is it auto applied in filmic or sigmoid? I know that’s a poor way for me to say it, just don’t know any other way.
Can you elaborate on that?
Hi Mike,
I feel these are factored into the various tone mapping options of DT regardless of if you use sigmoid or filmic. I would personally not try and replicate the LR way of editing an image because DT is so superior. Filmic does have white and black relative exposure sliders that are very obvious to the user. Sigmoid has done away with these options in terms of visibility to the user. I nearly always use sigmoid as it gives good results straight out of the box whereas filmic just adds extra steps that must be done to achieve the desired look.
The preset reverts the tone equalizer to a basic tone curve, so I can raise the left hand end point to raise the black level for a more faded look, which I do for my floral macro shots. Of course you can also use it in the same manner as you would for a traditional tone curve.
Sigmoid and Filmic have the ability to set white and black points, which works well for tone mapping but isn’t as effect IMHO for creative edits.
No …LR uses the display referred white and black points I believe…
refresher here for DT and the difference
Global luminance in the 4 way is or can be used as a “black level” offset…switch to the waveform to see that … “white” is un-bounded and can be modified a number of ways including using the global tone mappers, tone eq, rgb colorbalance and fulcrum sliders in masks to tweak it as you edit… I suppose global brilliance is a bit like a white slider…
Be sure to at a bare minimum always set the thresholds in the mask tab of the rgb CB module to be sure that you target the desired region with your adjustments…
So Mike what were you using the whites and blacks sliders in LR for? I used to double click on them to automatically set the white point and black point to achieve a starting contrast. This could be very effective with hazy images lacking contrast if increased contrast was desired. DT approach may be a little different, but I suspect better.
instead of using darktable like lightroom try to find a default workflow following darktable concepts. There’re plenty of YouTube videos or posts here on basic workflows, so you‘d better spend your time there instead of asking for single lightroom features and how to map them to darktable…
There’s no shortcut and using darktable like lightroom will result in disappointment
Related to what whites and blacks does, this video show the histogram clearly: https://youtu.be/P_Tbq3dxECo?si=b0aq1sjfGqFyeQsN&t=222
Whites seems to move mostly the right side of the histogram, affecting also a little the middle point and barely the left side of the histogram.
Blacks works the same but on the left side.
It can be done with color equalizer and color balance RGB (darktable 4.6 user manual - color balance rgb)
Regards!
I agree Martin. To try and mimic Lightroom is not only foolish, it is also insulting to the developers of Darkroom. Darkroom stands on its right and in many ways better than Lightroom, as it allows the user to go to those depths that Lightroom can only aspire.
It is better to set up your workflow based on your experience and comfort with a module. In DT, there are many ways to skin a cat, so it ultimately comes down to personal preferences with the modules, and which ones to use more frequently. Frankly, over time I realise that I am working with a small set of modules 95% of the time.
I think there is a misunderstanding regarding my question. I was only trying to understand if the whites and blacks sliders as used in Lightroom are being used in darktable within a scene-referred workflow. @priort answered that earlier with a “No”.
I have no intention of “using darktable like lightroom” and never did.
Mike
The Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks in Lightroom are mostly spacial adjustments: they raise and lower exposure in areas. In that sense, they are most similar to the tone equalizer.
But, there is a second set of Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks in Lightroom, attached to the tone curve, which are tonal adjustments, like in Darktable’s RGB Tone Curve or the brilliance adjustments in Color Balance.
Replicating tonal adjustments is easy. Spacial is much more difficult, as there are various nuances to consider, such as the width of the tonal range that is affected, the amount of feathering, halo suppression, and many other parameters. They differ a lot between raw developers. And some even change behavior depending on the slider position: IIRC in Lightroom, the first 25% of whites is purely spacial, but beyond starts to lower the actual output white point.
In general, the (non-tone-curve) Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks behave in a scene-referred manner, and recover data from beyond white, but later stages can not. However, I noticed that Lightroom seems to leave some headroom beyond the white point that later stages can recover even though they are notionally display-referred. And while e.g. Lightroom’s contrast slider clearly affects both contrast and saturation (very display-referred), the Luma curve does not, and seems to internally transform into a linearized color space. It’s complicated, is what I’m saying.
