I’ve been fighting with the blue color of this bike since I bought it from a thrift store last year. Even the v4 scene referred filmic in 3.4 didn’t seem to solve all the problems but I’ve been trying the dev 3.5 builds the last day or so and holy crap wow. This is the easiest time I’ve had with photo software in general and the color is basically right straight out of the gate.
I think this bike suffers from a similar problem as the blue LEDs everyone loves and tends to not photograph well but this is the closest I’ve come to pixels matching my human vision. This may seem kind of boring and not really a showcase piece but to me it’s a victory.
What changed between 3.4 and current dev versions for this result then?
Did the default change, and did you get color-calibration into your modules? Or did filmic really change? (I haven’t read about changes in filmic… but then again, I haven’t been following properly).
Are you sure it just isn’t setting the default workflow to ‘modern color’ ?
(Because then I might have to try some dev builds if I can find them :P)
Its a great tool. I love the brilliance slider…really nice way to brighten up the image just that extra bit or for that matter tone it down without distorting too much…
The lure of raw. With every improvement in the digital processes, the temptation to revisit previously processed raw files, to benefit from the new “tech”. I logged on to comment on another thread some good results I was obtaining from filmic today. It is quite special, what has been achieved, over the last 2 years in dt. Phenomenal.
It’s about improved skills as well. I’ve been a darktable user for years now, and I’m still learning. There are a lot of my old edits that I would approach entirely differently these days.
I honestly feel at this point dt is basically all you need unless you need pixel based operations. I honestly find myself trying to do everything in raw anymore especially since I changed my approach to shooting and striving to get what I want right in camera first. Getting it right in camera first is really what pushes the new scene referred workflow over the top of all other approaches.
All the remade and refined modules really make it easier to also be technically correct and creative without hiding details needed for precise control.
So overall my new approaches at capture time designed with the help of a amazing new motivational YouTube photography channel I found combined with the amazing work of the dt team is really allowing me to have fun with photography again.
Hard to think at one time filmic is one of the reasons I stopped looking at dt now its approach is what pulls me back along with the new reworked modules which behave much more predictably now.
So here’s a DT 3.4 edit. I tried to match up the filmic settings as best I could but as @Matt_Maguire mentioned some new modules don’t exist in 3.4 so results aren’t exactly the same. I’m sure I could get a better result out of 3.4 with more effort but I’m mostly excited about how quickly I can get the above.
On my display the 3.4 result has a more electric look to the blue than tin 3.5/3.6. The newer software gives a more natural looking result. In hindsight this probably isn’t the best shot of this bike to illustrate the problem. But if one has this bike in bright sunlight getting the blue under control is difficult. I have darktable 3.5 built on my laptop and am I’m still using 3.4 on my desktop so I’ll try to move some other photos to my laptop and try to edit them there. It’s a more subtle difference than I thought it was at 2:00 in the morning but still a difference nonetheless.
@kofa Sure name of the channel is The Photographic Eye. It is a no gear channel focus is specifically on the art of seeing the shot. Also has videos on the photography of various “legendary” visionaries of the art.
@lhutton the difference is subtle but I do think the new version is better. I do find blues to be one of the harder colors to keep in control along with oranges especially when you get a highlight. To my eye it seems like the new version holds its hue and saturation better drifting less to cyan but hard to tell exactly from my iPhone.
I wondered if the blue issue here was to do with being out of gamut. So I loaded the 3.4 version into dt thinking that if I increased the saturation a little, it would start to show OOG, indicating it was probably OOG before generating the jpeg.
However the blue frame is showing OOG immediately and you have to reduce sat to about 88% (using old colour balance module) to clear the OOG highlighting.
I don’t understand that - I thought the gamut must be clipped to sRGB if you’re making an sRGB jpeg - and therefore by definition it can’t be OOG when you open the jpeg. I checked with Gimp and the embedded profile is indeed sRGB. My softproof profile is sRGB web safe. What’s the explanation pls?!
Gamut warnings are based on what you have set for your histogram profile. Which generally should be your working profile. Your output profile will map gamut down to the output profile color space on export…perceptual by default but you can use relative or absolute as well depending on your desire to manage color of the output…
See here…not sure what minute…maybe in and around 30??
This is my understanding too and the blue does show as OOG on my end with the RAW. My working profile is whatever my colorimeter and displaycal plopped out and GNOME loaded. But I take the defaults of sRGB for softproof and histogram since 99% of the time I’m either going to a dye printer or the web.
Like I said, it’s a similar to the much hated blue LEDs. TBH I’m not entirely sure how it would be handled with a JPEG in darktable?
Your output profile does that mapping…I think your working profile should be the widest possible but you have your way of working…as long as you stay in gamut during the edit the output profile will handle mapping it down to sRGB…so linear rec2020 gives you a nice wide colorspace to work in and then it gets mapped down to sRGB …if you use SRGB as your guide I think you are limiting yourself…
