As primarliy a RT user I’ve used the Local adjusments > Log encoding quite a lot building mainly from dev.
Despite the explosion of sliders in the RT interface the decoupling of the log and the curve makes it easier to control imho. It does suffer, when used as a full image edit, from destroying highlights in clouds! I frequently have to add an excluding spot over highlights to bring back detail. A very different issue than the darktable one but perhaps they are related? In RT it seems to sort of undo any highlight recovery and flattens it do a dull colour. It’s my pet peeve with RT Log at the moment.
For those interested I basically use
Log strength
Mean luminance (under viewing conditions. I (ab) use this to raise shadows)
If someone has the time, it would be great to have a “this is how you get dramatic skies in Darktable 3.8” tutorial.
Basically a RAW file shot during daytime with some blue skies + nice clouds, a mild exposure adjustment with a gradient mask, then diffuse and sharpen and finally some color boosting to taste.
They are good, but not the kind of program I was looking for.
No tools to manage photo collection, slow screen refreshing when you change an slider and no feedback when you are moving it, clutter interface…
But for my tests they make a better work in clipped light recovery at least when recovering color of zones witch one or two clipped channels.
And it is easier to get more pleasent results in highlights, may be due to the more classical non linear approach to developing.
In general I far prefer DT , for it it only has these drawbacks: poor clipped light recovery when you need to reconstruct color and harder to get pleasent results in highlight when you want to expand them to the midtones.
It’s super easy. Use a new instance of the colour calibration module with, for example, a gradient mask, darken the blue channel and compensate by lightening the red channel:
Personally I don’t need “dramatic” but if you can get good dramatic skies, you can allway be less aggressive.
And I would add using as low modules as possible and I would add using a sample photo with some highlights in skies clipped in one or two channel y a coloured zone, to see how best use of highlight recovery module and filmic.
Probably a sunset or sunrise is a good example.
May be tone equalizer, filmic (of course), highlight recovery, a bit of color calibration magic, color balance RGB and local contrast?
Of course using parametric and local masks to appropiate selections and some focusing (but that won’t be the main objective, for the sky no need of special focusing).
Well yes, but that was an easy one, not many contrast in the original.
I was using balance RGB to try to do it until recently I discoverd it is easier usually with color balance.
When you have a backlit and your sky is a bit overexposed in order to have no too strong darks, and you need to compensate both gets harder.
May be it is all due to the linear editing which needs more aggresive curves or something to expand that highlights.
So (again, and sorry to harp on this): an image which you (or someone else) considers challenging in Darktable 3.8 for the purposes of this discussion would really help to focus the conversation.
Without concrete examples, is it very hard to say if something is inherently difficult or unsatisfactory in Darktable, or perfectly possible and easy with the right tools.
Personally, I think that it will take me another 6–12 months to transition to the new setup in a way that I can exploit its full power, so I am marking photos to revisit with the amazing new stuff I keep learning here.
Yes, you are right.
I am right now seeking and trying with some of mines.
I had previously linked an image that I considered it to be quite challenging, as it has some clipped lights in a yellowhish zone.
And it is backlitted: a bridge over the sky.
It was uploaded to a spanish forum in order to get edition advices and nobody could get a very pleasent result.
I will try to edit it first using filmic, then sigmoid and compare it with ART (I am not proficient at all with it) or may be my old LR if I remember how to use it yet.
May be it would be better to put it in play raw and just post a link here.
Other situation that takes me a bit of time to fight is when you take a photo of a building against a grey and cloudy sky and you over expose it a bit to get more details in the building.
It takes quite an effort to get details in the clouds.
I think for sure you work on some skies at least in one if not more than one of your videos as well…maybe the one where you explore scene vs base curve and the “jpg” look…also I think your older one on the channel mixer maybe…
Probably not the best testing photo you can get (the other of the bridge would be more interesting) but one that presents clipped highlights and a dull overexposed sky.
I have processed it with sigmoid, but I have an old version (DT 3.3).
The results using color calibration to darken sky I think are quite better than what I was getting previously.
When you have a backlit scene of a building you want good detail and exposure in the building, sky is not the most important part, but you would like to have a sky with some levels not just an almost whit sky.
In sunsets, not clipping some part of the image is not an option (even if it is the sun, which is not white by the way and which would be problematic in DT).
Other situations of low light with intense ilumination like pubs or discotheques or concerts are other examples of when clipping lights is mandatory.
And not everybody has the ultimate sensor in his camera in order to be able to recover shadows several steps with low noise.
Mine are not bad, but xe2 is not the best in that aspect.
But I will keep it in mind, may be that in scene referred workflow you can recover shadows better and with less noise compare to the old tools we were used to.
Not me who was asking for dramatic sky (depends i what you called dramatic) just not so dull.
You don’t allways have a tripod or the time to do that.
Most of my photos are when travelling or going for a walk, not a prepared photo.
That would be an appropiate answer if other tools were not able to get better results.
What was discussed here was whether filmic and /or scene refered workflow was in the origin of making it more difficult to expand those lights or not.
The color balance trick provided by @s7habo seems to work quite well.
And highlight recovery in color preservation is problematci in DT as it creates artifacts.
Just addressing people to not clip their photos would not solve the flaws.
I think we are going a bit out of topic here, and @jandren won’t be happy.
The topic was about comparing sigmoid and filmic and whether it would be good to have it in mainstream.
Most of us are having a look to sigmoid due to difficulties in expanding highlights (in skies for example) and seeking for alternate paths.
May be related but not the initial intend of the OP.
But when an important zone in the image has clipped pixels, you have irretrievably lost information. Any program that claims it can recover that information is lying, plain and simple. The best you can hope for is some kind of approximation. And getting a good colour approximation is even harder than getting an approximation of luminosity, even when only one channel is clipped (with three channels clipped, I wouldn’t even talk about “approximation”, it’s more like “guess”).
And I don’t see where switching between sigmoid and filmic has any relation to highlight recovery…
Of course you have lost information, but some tools do a better job recovering or giving the photo a more natural aspect than others.
Most times the clipped areas are more or less uniform in color, and the luminance can be retrieved from the remaining channels.
The color preservation in highlight recovery does a decent job… if you overlook the artifacts it generates many times.
You are right, there are too separate things: highlight recovery (nothing to do with sigmoid) and the difficulty in expanding highlights to the midtones when using filmic and the linear scene referred workflow compared to the traditional workflow (where sigmoid or other tone mapping tool could help, or at least some would expect so).
The debate about recovery emerged when it came to give examples about skies.
This is only true to some extent. Scene referred doesn’t improve your camera sensor. Under exposing means noise. Filmic can handle raising shadows quite gracefully but it introduces just as much noise as other software because it’s in the data.
Often the sky or other blown areas are of tertiary importance. There’s no real info there for your scene but you just don’t want it looking odd and attracting undue attention. Graceful handling of highlights mean you can trade in noise for recovery in areas of quite low and unimportant detail. Most software makes this a possible trade off.
Edit: Just to add that I write this as a recovering clipophobic. I have thousands and thousands of underexposed images.
