I recently read a blog post from a Fuji MILC user, who claims to have minimized processing effort by relying on built-in Fuji processing styles, customized to taste. I would like to experiment with a similar workflow for Darktable.
Specifically, I thought I would build up my own presets from discussions like this one and Play Raw suggestions.
I would be interested in hearing from people who do this (ie have 3–10 “styles” they apply first, with minimal, optional tweaking). Specifically,
do you use styles or module presets?
how to you modularize the whole thing? do you have a style for the generics (eg lens correction, CA, denoising) and then styles for specific “looks”?
if you use styles, do you append or replace module settings (related to the previous question)?
I suspect there will be many answers and it might be somewhat influenced by what sort of images you take and the volume. Personally I take travel shots, family event shots and general out and about shots while hiking and biking.
For these often the jpg is really good enough as I am just trying to capture the “memory” and not to produce a work of art.
I have up to this point made very little use of styles. I have not found them to be useful in DT and indeed in many other software packages. For me editing the raw is about targeted local adjustments and or enhancements and so in the past when I have tried to use styles I find the universal applicability is very low to serve that purpose…might be great on one photo but on another it goes sideways and so is of little benefit.
I came to rely on a set of presets for the key modules I use and I apply these as needed. I have a couple of autopresets as well… basically after deciding on what images I will process I pick one as a sort of key frame and do an edit on that one. When I am happy if any other images are similar or matches for light and subject matter I just copy the settings… then I move to the next image make an edit and repeat by copying to images that are similar to that one…using this process I work my way through a set of images…
The odd time because I have such a large collection of them downloaded I will play with a lut but really its an add and see if it looks better process as its hard often to know what colorspaces the lut is designed for and also luts can clip or mess up the data because of this so for me they are not a big part of my editing…
So really no major use of styles for me or even luts but strategic use of presets and copy and paste of settings from what I call key frames…
Its very easy to create a profile that applies the same global color and adjustments to match any of the built in .jpg filters fuji, or any 3rd party app/device applies to your image. Personally, i think its always bad to emulate someone whos goal is to mass produce photographs with as little individual input as possible into a photograph. The biggest issue with trying to remove manual editing/developing from your workflow, is how profiles work. If you design your profile for natural sunlight/4500k or whatnot, and theres a green tint, or a red LED light, or whatever, its going to effect how the colors look after you apply the profile. (Wierd sky/water hues are a dead giveaway) And your exposure could be different, contrast, saturation, level of shadow detail, even what iso you use, will make generic profiles a bit scattershot at best, and a detriment to your photo at worst. Just changing your aperture will change the contrast and saturation in an image, for example.
Ive been saving (and using a naming convention to tell me what i was correcting) .icc profiles for years on rawtherapee, and use them as a starting off point, then adjust to suit the photo. And have a “generic” profile with just the camera specific info/darkframe/demosaicing settings/etc. Id say i spend 5 minutes on general raw edits, even with the generic profile, often less if its very close to other images ive edited lately. export to gimp, crop, resize, export.
This has been a “debate” within digital photography for as long as .raw formats have existed though. And ive typically found that peeling back the surface layer of a fuji, canon, or nikon .jpg in-camera processing/filter advocate, just exposes someone who has no idea, and no motivation to learn, how to use raw processing software. Its one of the most powerful differences between film, .jpg cameras (consumer p&s/phones), and real ILC (any camera that saves in raw). If you dont enjoy that part of digital photography, maybe its a good idea to focus more on that part and get more comfortable with it, instead of trying to remove it from the workflow.
I guess I don’t meet the criteria of 3-10 styles, I have one base style that gets me to a “basic edit.”
But my single style turns on lens correcton, applies two DoS presets: local contrast and capture sharpening, and uses my Color Balance RGB preset that gives me the color intensity I generally want. I then usually increase the exposure, increase the filmic RGB contrast, and if necessary tweak the filmic white/black relative exposure sliders. Of course I have the scene referred filmic workflow already turned on, which takes care of white balancing in 97% of cases.
If I were to go further (I don’t, each photo gets its own treatment generally) I’d probably break up the styles into two groups: tone and color, and then work from there.
All my styles append and do not overwrite.
No luts for me thus far.
Maybe you could share your process in a separate thread? Many have tried to emulate SooC jpegs and while many are close, I haven’t seen any that match in a multitude of conditions.
I’ve seen a lot of work that I really liked where the photographer was heavily into the “Fuji recipes” scene, where the community concentrates on tweaking the in-camera jpeg engine. At the end of the days, the results matter, and how well you can make use of the tooling you do use matters more than what specific tooling you actually have.
I enjoy post processing and that’s why I use darktable and process every frame individually.
But if others are able to execute their artistic vision using just in camera processing and their work is compelling, then more power to them.
From interacting with OP for a while here, I think they’re plenty technical and apt at editing. One of the promises of computers is removing repetitive work, so if they can make a few styles/presets that help them get where they’re going faster and with less knob twiddling, then that would be good, no?
I like the idea of the fuji film-influenced presets replicating the sense of sending a specific film off to a developer and seeing what comes back though it seems at odds with DT principles and I can’t imagine it working for every digital image. I’ve never used LUTs in DT, though I get the idea of being able to just toggle different styles on and off to experiment with a look that you might never have come up with yourself. I briefly used Sigma’s slightly mad processing software with some foveon sensor shots and they have a bunch of quite radical presets. A few are just nuts (like random blueness) but I tried their sunset preset on one pic and it was really pretty good and I never would’ve made such a dramatic edit from scratch.
Odd you should reference knob twiddling … it is precisely knob twiddling that has made where I’m going faster - specifically my X-Touch mini MIDI device.
I use a few presets which auto-apply to images I import shot on my Nikon DSLRs (but not to cell-phone pictures, for example): Exposure, denoise, sigmoid, sharpen. Then I will regularly tweak just a few parameters mostly only using the X-Touch.
Yes, some things like a midi controller can make things go faster.
For me, I have E + mouse scroll set to exposure, C + Mouse scroll = filmic contrast, B + mouse scroll = filmic white relative exposure, T + mouse scroll = filmic black relative exposure
I have created a number of styles and selecting one of these styles is the starting point for all my editing. The top style in my list respects the cameras EV compensation look, but applies the 0.7 EV recommended by the developers for the exposure module. The WB and CC modules are set to as shot in the camera and I also apply my basic denoise and sharpening to the image. I have other styles for different starting points. The deblur presets at the bottom of the list are for images that require extra sharpening from the very start.
I have not yet got into using LUTs. This may be simply inexperience on my part but I don’t feel compelled to apply a LUT that tries imitate another person’s, film or camera style. I like to create my own edits. The only time I have tried LUTs I was disappointed with the results. However, I do make presets in certain modules such as the new color equalizer module to emphasize certain colors such as blues or greens in landscapes.
From this discussion, I think that for me a “style” is mostly about manipulations based on hue, something that I usually capture with color calibration or color equalizer. For this I can use presets.
For everything else, I either always apply a module (eg lens correction), or make changes that are really specific to an image and can’t easily be automated (D&S, tone equalizer, of course these have presets but I don’t always want to apply them).
So the bottom line is: single style, lots of presets.
lens correction ON (it works for all cameras and lenses, the lens data and other settings are not saved in the preset)
color calibration set to in-camera (the default also uses the camera’s WB, but then if it’s close to one of the illuminants, switches to that instead of using the exact value – on some images this causes a subtle, but visible shift).
Then I have a few styles, e.g. one combining some diffuse or sharpen and local contrast, one for sigmoid (it also includes turning off filmic), one for the reverse.
That is not DT’s interpretation of a style. I describe a specific style in my post above. Here is what is included in that style. It is just certain modules that I know I want to do this and that with and rather than going to each module as a matter of routine I can apply multiple modules that I routinely use to save time.
It would be possible to create styles that produced a certain look that to some degree replicate camera picture styles such as portrait, landscape, faithful, vivid etc. This could include modules that affect color, saturation, sharpness, local contrast, sharpening and so much more.
Being repetitive but I think it would be good to have a bunch of push button “styles” to try out like mood boards even if you just try to recreate them afterwards with something tailored to the file because sometimes surprises are good. LUTs seem a faff. On the other hand, maybe it would be dreadful.
