Hi yall! First post here. I’m new to darktable, and I understand that the preview image of my .NRW file is a jpg in lighttable and it makes sense that when I switch to darkroom the image changes to accurately show the raw file. However, what I don’t understand is why my image gets more blurry and out of focus when moving to darkroom? Based on the tutorials I see on youtube, color correcting is usually all that’s needed to get your image back on par with JPEG quality so that you can being processing further. But I’m finding that I have to do a lot of denoising and sharpening in order to get my raw files looking somewhat close to JPEGS. It just seems really convoluted. Is there something I’m missing here? I’m struggling to use my raw files when I can’t even get them to look like their jpeg equivalents to begin with…
DT does very little out of the box to your raw so you need to be aggressive with color and contrast and you might get a lot of good information searching the forum about the merits and folly of trying to match your jpg…Just remember your raw file is not a super JPG…it is merely the light captured and unaltered by the camera processing. Some software will apply a lot of auto correction by default.in DT it’s more up to you…
You can share ie upload an actual raw and people will share how they edited it…this can help you learn…
I know of no reason in general why a raw file should “look” close to a JPEG produced from that file - especially in terms of the degree of convolution a.k.a. blur.
I often wonder why people consider “the JPEG” to be a standard by which a true raw image is judged.
I think I’ll make another post and see if anyone in this community wants to give editing the raw file a try. Looking to learn the ways of editing in DT.
Just super new to photography and post processing, and I guess my mind gravitates toward trying to match the jpg preview before going further into the editing process.
Rather than explaining filmic which you used…disable that and enable sigmoid… Try default and tweak contrast and maybe skew. also try the smooth or aces presets to just for comparison…filmic is also good but a bit more nuance… also take exposure to a spot where the butterfly is well exposed and then sigmoid or filmic can be used to manage the dynamic range
The Play Raw category is waiting for you if you are willing to share the image with the community for post-processing fun. Review other posts for formatting; the raw file should include a creative commons licence. Alternatively, you may examine what others have done with other images in existing Play Raw threads. As well, there are excellent tutorials from people like @s7habo.
Would love see this nice picture in ‘Play Raw’.
Please do so…
In addition to @afresee this youtube channel of Boris Hajdukovic. It will keep you very much busy, will be hard in the beginning as much is new for you.
Another thing helped me very much. When you are in dt’s darkroom you’ll have all modules on the right hand side. It’s quite overwhelming. It is possible to make a selection of most used modules and put them in your own tab. And then mostly going bottom up decide which to use. When you’re ready for such action give us a shout and we’ll try to help.
For example, it is not generally possible to edit the image data in a raw file. Normally the raw data is converted to a wide-gamut working space such as the 32-bit Prophoto RGB in RawTherapee and that is what is edited, not the raw image data. Even then, that is not what you see on your screen review which is the wide-gamut working space converted to 8 or 10 bit RGB.
And then JPEG compresses image data and does chroma-subsampling so, with respect to the raw, Monty Python springs to mind …
I didn’t realize how much is going on behind the scenes with working color spaces and what you actually see on screen. I guess I need to stop thinking of the JPEG as the “goal” and start looking at the RAW as a blank canvas instead.
