Thanks Aurelien and all other DT deveolpers and contributors for your awesome work.
I came back to a lot of old edits this weekend with DT 3.2.1 and used the new linear RGB workflow. It is awesome, I was even able to recover images that I painfully discarded because I could not get where I wanted because of halos or weird effects after too much processing in the LAB workflow.
Now much of what I want can be achieved in less steps, but most importantly can be achieved.
I love the sound of using any software for dodging and burning in that linear RGB space that does the magic. If itâs Krita then Krita it is.
Actually you gave me the clue I was looking for for that.
Even if itâs not implemented in DT yet, I will start learning krita ASAP.
Any tips on where to start looking for good tutorials on it?
@glantucan: You can dodge and burn in darktable itself â even in linear space!
The completely manual method: Duplicate an exposure module and set it to expose higher (dodge) or lower (burn) and use a drawn mask (an icon at the bottom of the module) to control it. If you control-click on the paintbrush in the mask settings, you can continually add strokes. After youâre done, feather the mask to make it more elegantly match your surroundings.
Alternatively, use the tone equalizer to do this all for you.
In most cases, itâs enough by itself, but if you want to do something additional, you can combine it with the duplicated exposure module technique above. When using both techniques, you might want to stack the additional exposure modules used for dodging and/or burning above the equalizer (control-shift drag to reorder the additional equalizer modules; something you generally shouldnât do) so they take effect afterward, else they would also effect the tone equalizer (and you might not want this).
And, of course, if none of this works for you, then you could always resort to editing in Krita. But itâs best to try to keep edits in darktable when you can.
Thatâs actually what Iâve been doing and it works perfectly almost all the time.
⊠except I didnât pay attention to the ordering of the stack of dodges and burns respect to the tone equalizer, so thanks for that @garrett, I will pay attention to it from now on. Probably some weird behavior I was having on some of my edits were caused by that.
But, actually, my wording wasnât right because I was thinking also about painting, cloning, removing distracting elements, etc. when I was thinking about dodge and burn.
Some of that can be done in DT too with some spot removal and retouch trickery but that makes DT lag a lot after a few module instances on my machine.
For studio photography I probably never would go out of darktable, but for street photography I need to clean up quite a lot some of the images.
Unfortunately retouch need a lot of processing time as well as denoise (profiled) so itâs recommended to do the retouch as early as possible - at least before denoising.
Since the processing sequence is baked into darktable it doesnât make any difference if this is made early in the workflow, then deactivated and then reactivated after the remaining edits are made.
