I’m trying to fall in true love with Dark Table after a fairly long career in c1. The absolute control DT offers is amazing, but one thing i’m battling is skin-tones. it seems like often no mater what I do, i end up with somewhat pasty looking skin tones. I can add toning and saturation, but I struggle to get it looking remotely natural to what I get out of the box with the more consumer focused software.
I have a BS degree in photography and worked professionally for over a decade, so i’m not a “newbie”, and have a decent understanding of color management, but not to the extreme scientific terminology that is all over the manual and the deeper menu options.
I feel like i’m using the recommended workflow for the current version- sticking with linear RGB modules, setting exposure for mid-tones, filmic… the only think i think i’m doing thats a bit outside the recommendation is that I typically don’t find the linear slider within filmic to produce good results, and typically keep that close to 0. Part of me thinks that it has at least in part to do with the color calibration and the dual white-balance thing.
Can anyone relate to this? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
Hi @JP_Richardson and welcome! As already mentioned, some examples and which modules you’re using would be really helpful. Talking about it in the abstract will get frustrating quickly for all involved.
How does sigmoid look by comparison…also try editing without them if you don’t need them to manage the dynamic range after you set exposure. You get some compresson and loss of detail and with filmic some desaturation all of which you have to add back to taste… As noted a couple of examples or a playraw submission here might help… this is where you can upload your raw and edit for comment suggestions and alternate edits…
I am amazed at how quickly people have jumped in on this thread! I apologize for not knowing the ways around this site and the protocols. I was preparing a simplified edit and think I may have found the issues in the process of stripping my edit. I think I was pushing the primaries too far, and also boosting the red brightness in the calibration too high. I’m going to keep fiddling around but I think i’m now moving in the right direction…
While i’m here, if people would like to chime in, it seems like the primaries tool is a little “cleaner/direct” being fully linear and from what I understand directly channel based (compared to color balance RGB) I’ve been primarily pushing the saturation from there, and then a more slight vibrance boost, as apposed to playing with all the crazy sliders in Color Balance RGB. In order to get things into place I’m pushing the purity well above the default max of 50%… is this nonsense?
If its working for you, that’s good. We try to have a culture here of reading the manual, as it answers a lot of questions.
The answer seems to be: depends on where in the pixelpipe you apply it. Before your tone mapper for nudging colors around, after tone mapping for creative grading.
Check out the PlayRaw category, and maybe post a shot you have trouble with. If you don’t want to share one of your photos, download one from signatureedits.com and share that (their licence allows that, but check for yourself).
Also, check out @s7habo’s videos on YouTube (ignore the 2.6 below, he’s been making them for a long while):
My first suggestion would be to try the sigmoid workflow (or just switch off filmic and turn on sigmoid).
No disrespect to filmic, but I personally find sigmoid much more user friendly and also closer in terms of usage to other more mainstream software.