I read the RGB vs Lab article here as well as the filmic sticky. I understand about 1/3 of those posts.
I’ve just installed darktable for the first time. I’m willing to put in some time to learn things but I’d rather learn things right (correctly) from the beginning.
It seems like darktable is in the middle of a fairly major transition?
Are there new tutorials I should focus on to get in the habit of doing RGB modules first?
mek42
You are not the only one who found this challenging so don’t worry about it. For me it took some time for it all to sink in and it’s a continuous learning process but it’s all worth it.
I find scene-referred easier to use. The main difference is:
with display-referred, you have your input’s ‘levels’ (not a technical term; I could also say brightness) influenced by exposure and base curve. If either of those introduces clipping (at either end), you lose information. It can be very hard (e.g. with backlit scenes) to keep the highlights and raise exposure in the shadows. You can try to do it by modifying the base curve (which takes you from the ‘physical’ (linear) domain to your display-centric ‘editing’ domain), and/or by adding curves (e.g. tone curve) after the base curve. Some operations, which are related to physics (haze removal, lens correction etc.) are best done in the ‘physical’ domain.
with the scene referred workflow, it does not matter if you blow highlights before you hit filmic. So, using the backlit scene as an example, you can use the exposure module to lift the shadows. If you increase contrast in the ‘colour balance’ module, and you blow some highlights there, again, that’s not a problem. In filmic, you can select where your picture’s white point should be. Filmic de-saturates highlights and shadows, but you can use the ‘latitude’ control to make the range where colours are kept intact wider (you may need to lower contrast in filmic). Also, you can use the highlights-shadow balance control to slide the range of colours to be kept intact up and down around the mid-grey point. After filmic, you can still add more modules (curves etc.) to shape your picture further, but there you’ll have to be careful with clipping.
Mark much of this is referring to video but you can apply the same logic to your camera, sensor dynamic range etc…its a 5 part blog that additionally works through creating a custom LUT for your camera again using video from a Nikon D5200 as an example but you can translate much of the information to stills. Its a nice read and should make understanding the application of a "linear or scene referred: workflow more relatable. Adventures in Scene Referred Space - Part One — Paul Chambers 3D