I’m doing my ‘proper’ editing on darktable and I am kinda fond of using vignettes to focus attention in my photos on the areas that matter. At the same time, I also use Googles Snapseed to edit photos on the go, with a somewhat similar style. Yet the Snapseed vignettes are more pleasing, whereas in darktable it looks more obvious, like a progressively darkening circle (which it is of course)
I was wondering about this for a while and came to the conclusion that Snapseed does not apply the vignettes uniformly but rather dependant on the brightness of the background.
Say I have a picture of the dark sea, a kayak and a blue sky above (you’ll excuse me, I’m at the beach right now) and apply a vignette then darktable would yield a dark halfcircle/arch in the sky - rather unpleasant, whereas Snapseed would mostly leave the sky alone and darken the edges of the water in the bottom.
Is there a way to get this effect in a simple way? I can approximate this effect with 2-4 GD filters arranged, but it is rather tedious since each change has to be applied to the top/bottom ones separately.
What do people think? Would this be a useful improvement? Am I completely off the rails? Is there an easier way to achieve what I want already in current darktable and I just haven’t found the option to do so?
I have used a few different modules for this, I think all of them give better results than the Vignette module.
Exposure. More pleasing, but not very cusomizable.
Color Balance. Use the gamma/power slider to affect the midtones the most and leave highlights.
Tone Curve or RGB Curve. Here you are totally free to decide where you want the greatest effect.
All of these should of course be used with an inverted circle or ellipse mask. Also, experiment with feathering the mask to see if it helps to follow edges.
could you share an example? you sure it’s not gamma vs linear vignette? also the dt vignette has had C2 discontinuities from the very beginning, resulting in very visible banding. maybe that’s what you’re seeing? i seem to remember someone was working on this in the past but forgot the end of the story.
I’m not a frequent user of the vignette module, but I just quickly tried the effect you are trying to achieve by adding a simple parametric mask on the vignette module.
just select the mask based on luminosity (inverted mask) and play with the cursors to adjust the intensity.
Depending on the type of vignette I want depends on where I do them. If you just want a quick vignette to place I would recommend a Radial Mask on exposure or a curve.
If you want a more creative vignette which are the kind I prefer for maximum control over where the eye is pulled I use a mask in a raster editor created with the lasso tool or painted in with a brush giving maximum control over the shape and direction.
Hm, I have also observed that some magic sauce is missing in darktables vignette a couple of years ago: Vignette secrets. @Leonidas, maybe you can find better example pictures that shows the problem than I was able to provide. Especially a comparison of different software with the same picture would be interesting.
Thanks for your contributions, I am glad to see it is not just me having issues, though whether our concerns are of the same nature I don’t know. But it hints at the fact that many people are using other tools than vignette to get what vignette is trying to do. I will give this a try next time I am editing a photo like this, thanks @paperdigits, @pphoto, @blj, @Oleastre.
Here’s some examples from my shot yesterday. They are not perfect but maybe it will help to illustrate my concerns.
The original shot, just cropped with Snapseed, you can see the sky is mostly uniform blue.
Here it is with a vignette applied with Snapseed. I am running this at about 80% to make it more obvious, since normally it is pleasingly more subtle. To me it seems like the bottom got a lot darker than the sky.
Here is #1 edited in Darktable with the Vignette module. I always have to turn off saturation adjustments completely, make the scale really low and give it a high falloff, yet it still is somewhat not as pleasing (and too strong anyway) as the Snapseed one with very little tuning.
(To be fair, if I played with the darktable output for some more time I think I could’ve gotten it to a point where it is okay, but to me something feels missing. Maybe other defaults? I am not an artist and I hesitated to post this since I don’t have an “objective” diagnosis for why it seems lacking, maybe one of you will can spot it, meanwhile I’ll be on the lookout for potentially better examples)
With this particular kind of shot when you make the vignette it would be best to make the outer portion much larger then the frame, make sure you have a huge feather, and tweak the strength to taste. This can be done with a radial mask or the vignette tool. What will happen if you do it this way is you get a much softer and subtle graduation preventing the less pleasing dark corners.
I do think here you will get a more pleasing result and should also remove that banding issue using the radial mask over the vignette tool. This method also give much more control over the the feather and if tied in with the parametric mask tool in darktable you can even pull it out of the blacks.
I use the exposure module with a mask. I find that the vignette effect becomes more subtle when I use Filmic RGB if I move the exposure instance to the very end of the pipeline, just before “output color profile”-module.
