Hello, I recently made a post in Software > darktable, but thanks to @Terry I now see this is a better category.
I’m hoping to get a xmp that I can apply to many of the photos that I recently took for my son while on vacation. He’s wanted to visit some of the existing filming locations that Buster Keaton used in his films, and then create a “Then & Now” set of stills and photos to use in a presentation.
Here is an example of the “then”, “now” (jpg), as well as the raw file for the “now” photo:
It seems to me that the original image has neither a true white or black and rather a muddy grey in the shadows and a light grey instead of white. The tone equalizer module could be used to lift the extreme blacks to a shade of dark grey and drop the whites to a shade of light grey. @marter has achieved what I am suggesting. I suspect he has done something similar.
How about this: I tried to make a really simple style that should work for all pictures. White balance module is set to reference for your specific camera body, and colour calibration module does white balance as shot in camera.
The monochrome conversion numbers in the 2nd CC instance are a little arbitrary, but majority green, then red, then blue.
I’ve reduced local contrasts a little with contrast equaliser. I’m not sure if you’re after ‘look like old film’ or if you instead want high details, full tonal range for the modern pictures.
I’ve done this with AgX white and black targets. (advanced curve parameters)
Exposure is all controlled with AgX in this preset; you can adjust the white and black relative exposure points (at the top) if the scene was too bright or dark, and you can adjust ‘pivot relative exposure’ to control midtones.
I also put lens correction on.
Colourise module for orange tint. Adjust its saturation to taste.
Thanks for posting, this was fun to play with! I think the biggest challenge is simply the amount of detail in ‘now’ being way ahead of what was possible ‘then’. You may feel I cheated a bit to bring them into parity…
I used similar efforts with Tone Curve as others here, to level out the blacks and compress the whites. One additional masked tone curve instance with a raster mask of some film grain to add a bit of blotchyness, as well as simulated grain and surface blur.
The ‘cheat’ part was to export this at 600px wide and scale it back up 240% in mspaint - This may have negated some of the grain tweaks I did, but the result isn’t too bad.
Do note that this is likely due to scanning of the film and not a real representation of what it really looked like projected. So always hard to judge contrast based on the scan vs what it looked like on the projections of the time…
Based on some quick searches the films were shot on nitrate film and projected on fabric screens coated with silver or aluminium, so the likelyhood of high contrast is pretty high.
and setting a detail mask on the diffuse/sharpen (I used this rather than surface blur). I’m trying to preserve strong contrast on the fuzzy edges, but dampen the sharper ones
This is without the scaling hack and is perhaps closer to the intent, though it’s still not there. I’m not going to dive into masking with this one, but I wonder if there’s a way to parametrically pick out the foliage for a further softening, but without killing the sharpness on the posts and gate?
XS104795.RAF.xmp (21.3 KB)
I may have tried to do something unsightly but see if this dither+ crazy diffusion works interestingly. I don’t have the raster mask but it might just be able to get the texture especially after the “cheat”.
- This may have negated some of the grain tweaks I did, but the result isn’t too bad.
