Wishing Darktable had brush-editable masking

Processing
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DSC03013_White-faced-ibis
DSC03013_White-faced-ibis7980×5320 18.2 MB

For this (South Texas USA) White Ibis I managed to get focus centered on the eye, with Sony 200-600mm zoom.

For all wildlife shots I like to isolate the whites of the eyes and then crank the exposure menu up by one full stop. In some dark eyeball cases (if isolated) you can crank the exposure up as much as 3 or 4 stops, and then blur (just the eyeball) a bit.

This is essentially impossible to do in Darktable. It is not hard at all in Gimp. With Gimp a preliminary color threshold mask can be magnified greatly and then hand edited with a brush, so in a subsequent step you can lighten the eyeball only.

This is the only thing i use Gimp for. All other processing I do with Darktable. It sure would be nice if Darktable allowed mask editing with brushes.

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I assume here that is the blue part? Sounds like a play raw challenge to me.

By looking at this photo it doesn’t look like it’d be that hard.

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This could not be easier:

But maybe I misunderstood your request.

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That’s because in GIMP masks are basically images, where in dt they are basically curves. So completely different principles for storage. Which means implementing such a mask would be quite a bit of work, not just a modification of the current system.
(I know the raster mask is also basically a grayscale image, but that’s created from all active masks and not editable)

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Quick drawn and parametric mask can also leave the pupil alone if you want that to stay dark…

image

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I could see videos like this being part of YouTube Shorts in your channel.

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Dealing with the masks will indeed be my next episode. :wink:
Stay tuned!

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