FWIW I only own a 15’6 laptop, it fits entirely in height.
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Best show it in screenshots. A picture is worth a thousand words.
I can squeeze in the module but again often other modules will be closed but in the list above it depending on when and how i come back to it in an edit I might have to scroll a bit to center it but if I add a mask then its off the screen…and even centered that is 10 inches of movement to go up and down the module when you could click and move only a cm or two if they were collapsed…
Its just my use case i guess so don’t give it much bother.
4k monitor and it’ll fit 
Boris we would be much obliged if you could make a special video like a tutorial to achieve different effects with this module and a additional devoted to colour grading.
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I believe that is what Aurélien is about to do.
It might fit but I dont have 4 k and my monitor is 32 inches so with the module even if it fits this is like 13 or more inches of screen travel maybe more with the parametric mask options open. That makes for a fair bit of movement to move between options in the module rather tban subtle movements of the wrist. I can imagine its work to add this so I have no expectations
Unfortunately there’s no much room for reducing space without getting a cumbersome workflow.
It’s very useful to have a holistic view on the settings.
Maybe you can ditch the global slider if there’s a way to move the low/mid/high sliders simultaneously (e.g. by ctrl+drag on one slider).
Or you need a toggle to show or hide the low/mid/high sliders (similar to the show/hide toggle for color calibration using targets) - and persist a custom preference…
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The only other alternative (without code change) is to tweak the font size / CSS to get a more compact layout.
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For those who wanted a video demonstration…
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Awesome, many thanks Boris. 
Demonstrations of anyone’s workflow and ideas etc are just as valuable in my view as a tutorial.
I’ve watched a few different videos over the years and nearly always learn something from keyboard shortcuts (which I actively try to learn) to ideas and concepts that get shown that make me think “gosh, so that’s how you get that effect”
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I have a question about colour balance and I think this is the right thread to ask.
I know there are technical differences between the fulcrum contrast in colour balance rgb, and using the tone equalizer (perhaps one of the presets). One is a (largely colour invariant) luminance adjustment, and one adjusts actual pixel exposure.
But: is there a practical difference between using the colour balance contrast slider, and a tone equalizer contrast preset (s curve with detail preservation set to none) that I should be aware of?
The fulcrumed contrast is shit, that’s the difference. Since it’s not “S”-shaped, it moves the white point freely. So picture this workflow:
- you set-up overall brightness in exposure,
- you set-up black and white bounds of the DR in filmic,
- you add some contrast in color balance with the fulcrumed contrast,
- now your white point has moved up and you need to redo step 2, which will actually aim at reducing the contrast, which will go against the step 3.
That sucks.
Why is fulcrumed contrast still there though ?
It is customary to use color balance RGB masked, usually to treat foreground apart from background. Foreground is usually a reflective object/subject, while background often contains speculars and light sources. In case you want to make the reflective foreground pop up a bit more, then it’s fast to do it from the color balance contrast, and it should not affect your global white.
For anything else, tone EQ lets you nail the white point (whether you use details preservation or not) and massage the midtones independently, it’s a much better workflow since you don’t need a second pass on filmic.
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Thanks for the write-up! I like how with every post you make I get a better understanding of what a ‘valid’ workflow is and why the darktable pipeline is structured the way it is. But if I understand the graphs correctly it is very much possible (and in fact the tone equalizer contrast presets will do this) to increase the white point to some higher value such that an adjustment of the filmic white point is required.
It is possible if that is what you require, yes, but it also gives you an opportunity to nail the white value by simply forcing a +0 EV correction at +0 EV exposure level. The color balance RGB gives you no such option.
I see. But then I would say that a true s-curve like this would be a safer default for increasing global contrast with the tone equalizer.
(and now I will stop talking about it here, because this thread is for color balance and I’m national champion in derailing conversations)
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But then what is the difference with increasing contrast directly in filmic?
My understanding:
- In both color balance rgb and tone equalizer, you add contrast to the scene-referred, linear data. In filmic, you adjust the steepness of the tone mapping curve, potentially ‘overstraining’ it, which can lead to clipping due to the constraints placed on the curve, which you have to fix by backing off on the contrast or lowering latitude.
- Usually, you don’t mask filmic, and don’t apply multiple instance in the way you can do with color balance rgb and tone equalizer. (Though I have seen a ‘double-filmic’ trick by @s7habo, but that’s bordering on black magic for me.
Even that one did not use masks, if memory serves me well.) - In filmic, you have no control over the fulcrum (it’s mid-grey). In the other two modules mentioned, you do.
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Filmic deals with remapping dynamic range between different media. Whatever you do in there falls back to the basic question : “how do I want to drive the dynamic range trade-off when going to SDR ?”.
Color balance is an artistic module that doesn’t care about output medium.
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In the documentation:
https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/color-balance-rgb/#what-is-the-connection-with-liftgammagain
The lift/gamma/gain algorithm relies on a display-referred color space, since it assumes a bounded and symmetric dynamic range, with white point at 100% and gray at 50%. As such, it is simply unusable in a scene-referred space. However, the only incompatible part is the lift. The gamma is exactly the ASC CDL power, and the gain is exactly the ASC CDL slope.
The part quoted above, with lift being non-linear (addition), is about the original ASC definition, right? And in darktable color balance rgb, the same term, lift is used, but in reality, a gain (multiplication) is applied to the pixels deemed to be ‘dark’ based on the mask:
The color balance RGB module simply has two slopes instead of one: the gain, applied on the highlights extracted from the whole image by a mask, and the lift, applied similarly but on the shadows.
Is this correct?