Working with software where âorderâ is the first order of business (rawproc), itâs really neat to see this discussion going on darktable.
That said, Iâm going to throw a wrench into the discussion: rely less on what others tell you is âgoodâ, and find out why for yourself. Iâll give you my simplistic basis, and you can consider it for yourself: The camera records a scene in an array of pixels where the measurements are âenergy-basedâ, that is, related to the light energy presented to each pixel from the scene. âScene-referredâ is another name for this, and the deal with our processing is to disturb that energy relationship as little as possible in the early operations of raw conversion, saving the departure from it to a more perceptually pleasing presentation, e.g., by filmic and the other tone curve, to the end of the toolchain.
Understanding this, and what is each toolâs affect on it, will help you make better ordering decisions on your own, rather than just âwhat @anon41087856 sezâŚâ
FWIW, I would rather just pay attention to the arguments of people who have invested time into understanding these issues, and decide if I find them convincing or not. To form a serious opinion about this would require literally years of investment on my part, comparable to a graduate degree.
The problem with the experimental approach you advocate is that I would need to decide between methods that work 98% and 99.9% of the time, which is tricky because one may not run to all issues first.
My understanding is that the problem with the historical/display-referred/LAB/etc workflows is not that they never ever work, because then no one would have used them. The problem is that they can fail under some circumstances, and scene-referred tries to address these failures.
Fair enough, I know the time investment well, having done just that over the past seven years. It can be hard sometimes to separate from the inquiry long enough to go take picturesâŚ
I think youâll get to that eventually, though, as you go through bouts of âwhat the hell is going on here???..â and boom, you dig into itâŚ
This is a good point to consider in this discussion, as the old tools arenât just uniformly bad. Sometimes itâs a matter of degree; a scooch of color saturation after the tone curve might not look egregious, but dial it up from there and watch the progressive circusâŚ
My software only has crappy HSL color saturation, havenât spent time figuring out an alternative as of yet. So, I still use it, but only right after the initial processing to linear RGB, and then never more than just a few increments. Just keeping it before the tone curve has helped retain a bit of its usefulnessâŚ
Actually, at this point (3.8) I am fine with the complexity of Darktable. Having mostly made the transition to scene-referred, I am trying to focus on the 10-ish modules that I need 99% of the time and ignore everything else.
Currently my core workflow includes:
filmic rgb,
color balance rgb,
diffuse or sharpen,
color calibration,
crop,
tone eq,
exposure,
rotate and perspective,
denoise profiled
grain,
retouch
denoise (profiled).
(I am not counting orientation, chromatic aberrations, lens correction, highlight reconstruction, demosaic etc because these would naturally be enabled with safe defaults and are easy to deal with when I need to).
So the bottom line is that whenever someone says âhey, you can now ignore module X because module Y you are already using has the same functionalityâ, I am sold.
But wait, the same page of the manual also says that:
"Diffusion can be removed in order to:
recover the original image from sensors with an anti-aliasing filter or mitigate the blur created by most demosaicing algorithms (use the sharpen sensor demosaicing preset and move the module before the input color profile module in the pipeline)."
This seems to imply that sensor and demosaic correction should happen first, since the input color profile happens fairly early. Is this a contradiction, or am I missing something?
Going from memory but I think only color calibration is by default between input and diffuse so moving it before input is not a massive change in the pipeline wrt the other modules just the interaction of diffuse on the data before it gets to the input profileâŚ
I understand that it can be a very useful module, but for tweaking a few colors I found parametric masks w/ color balance rgb a reasonable substitute (if a bit more tedious to set up, because of the mask, but also more control).
Absolutely! I will also recommend the method you described.
I only use the color look up table very sparingly when I want to quickly change one or a few specific colors. In most cases only darken or lighten. It simply saves a lot of time.
The disadvantage is that you can create artifacts very quickly and the module is not suitable for scene-reffered workflow.
But I hope that there will be a scene-reffered version in the future.
Yes, I noticed in your tutorials that you often lighten a lens-shaped region in the middle to focus the eye. Neat trick, I have started using it.
I wish there was a picker-like tool that would set up a parametric mask in JzCzHz at the same time based on a region, with some kind of fall-off. This would help me with the âtweak single color, more or lessâ workflow.
Its a cube. You can select and mark colors to be left alone as you edit others but more over you can select multiple colors and just drag them in the 3-D cube. The initial select places a black dot or white dot I cant recall and then as you drag it draws a small directional line and then the dot is inverted to show its modifiedâŚI donât think there is a limit on the number of points . You can even select and drag a point to neutral for a color cast⌠I think its coolâŚI like the split opacity slider too. Its interesting that you can apply the same affect to the masked and unmasked area if you like just to a lesser degree of course the default is 0 and 100 percent.
At the risk of committing heresy, I like to use Color Zones towards the end of my edit sessions. I understand that you can get weird results if pushed too hard, but I find it a lot easier to use over parametric masks if I just want to tweak a certain color.