[Darktable] Basics: Developing a photo from start to finish & filmic rgb

hello welcome welcome this is going to be my first video on dark table i wanted to make a shortish introduction video that i could reference in the future so what we are going to do today is touch on the very important core basics of dark table and we are going to process a photo from start to finish using scene repaired workflow so you've installed dark table and launched it for the first time of course the first thing we are going to do is change some settings let's go to preferences processing and make sure auto apply pixel workflow defaults are set to scene referred and auto apply chromatic adaptation defaults are set to modern that's that we can close this window now this interface might be familiar to some of you especially to people coming from adobe lightroom i will try my best to avoid the direct comparison in this video but as a former lightroom user myself i might mislabel a thing or two here and there doc table consists of a couple of main sections light table and dark room there are others but they're not going to touch these today currently we're in the light table section where we can manage our photos and collections the darkroom section is purely for developing photos let's start at the beginning let's say i've already copied a couple of photos from my sd card in a dedicated folder somewhere on my computer what i need to do is import them into dark table expand the import section and click add to library simply navigate to the folder where you copied your photos or click the plus sign if it's not in the list of places already awesome these are my photos i will tick the ignore jpeg images box as i have no use for them i will click the select new button which will only add photos that are not currently in the album this way we can quickly and easily top up any existing album also known as collection with new photos you can also preview the photos by clicking on the eye icon finally let's hit the add library button let's select an image we want to work on and let's go to the dark room we'll quickly gloss over the workflow of developing a photo as it's slightly different than in other photography software packages just because in dark table you have the complete control of developing process and image pipeline on the right you will notice a list of familiar terms these are called modules there are a few mandatory modules most of them you can enable and disable duplicate reset or store a preset off and most importantly move but let's not make a mess just yet and leave it in the default order the order is important as the modules are processed from the bottom up it means that it will adjust the raw black white point first then move to white balance then highlight reconstruction so on and so forth since we're using scenery fed workflow let's switch to a predefined scene referred modules and module ordering this will get rid of all the deprecated and display referred modules that we can't really use in our pipeline at the top here you can currently see six tabs we can modify these in preferences but let's work with what we have for now the first one is quick settings which i'm not a big fan of so let's go straight to tab 2 which contains either active modules or all available modules we can switch between these two modes by using the tab button like a toggle active all active all the third tab is responsible for the core of the image and it's called base we can tweak the rotation adjust the exposure and most importantly use the filmic rgb to transform our scene into something that can be viewed on a screen next up is color which is self-explanatory then image corrections and lastly effects i always find myself using the active modules tab the most in tandem with the search bar i think it's easier quicker and more intuitive but it takes a bit of time to remember all the module names luckily they're pretty self-explanatory right let's get to it first things first let's fix the glaring problems see this flat pancake of the sun with a bit of red this yellow drizzled around it now i made this shot the way i made it on purpose it was really hot really sunny spring day and i really wanted to portray that in the photo so including the entire sign in the picture and overexposing was an excellent decision let's see if we can fix it we'll start by disabling the highlight reconstruction module as we will take care of the highlights later on firstly i will adjust the exposure slightly some parts of the image are still a bit dark let's open the module and we can make the adjustments simply by clicking and dragging on the slider hovering over and using a mouse wheel right clicking and making fine adjustments or simply typing a number that looks about right we can now close the module next up color calibration color calibration deals with the core colors of the image mainly we will use the color calibration to correctly set the scene illuminant and adjust the temperature you might notice that there is another module called white balance don't touch that it's currently required for the color calibration module to work correctly right so my eyes say that the image was shot outside in a nice and sunny day we can set the illuminant to d daylight and adjust the temperature to our taste that's that let's move to my favorite module filmic rgb filmic rgb will help us take all the scene information we captured with our camera and compress it into something that our displays can display otherwise everything outside the display's range which is typically zero to one would get clipped out and every flat pancake sun would stay a flat pancake sun now this might look scary but i promise it's only somewhat scary in short this is showing how our scene will be mapped to our display if we turn the axis labels on it will be a bit easier to understand so the darkest part of the scene we captured will be mapped to zero on our displays and the brightest part to the maximum luminance of our displays the ev0 the middle gray of the scene will be mapped to 18 of our display's output this is because our perception of lightness is not linear i wouldn't like to get any deeper into this topic in this specific video but there are really good in-depth videos by aurelion pierre the maker of filmic rgb module where he goes in depth about how our vision and the module itself works i will link his channel in the description and you might find one or two video cards appearing in my videos in the top right corner so the quickest way of getting these settings dialed in right is by entering the values of your light meter that you surely had at the time the photo was taken right all right the second quickest and good enough method is to use the autotune helpers so i'll start with a white relative exposure okay that looks good to me and then black relative exposure which is slightly off for my taste so i will just increase the dynamic range by adjusting the black relative exposure a few stops like so next we need to get rid of the awful mess that is the sun and a bit of overexposed c here in the corner for that let's move to reconstruct tab of filmic the reconstruct tab is aptly cold as we have no data what's in the flat pancake as the clipping happened at the sensor so we will try to do our best to artistically get out of this sticky situation let's enable the threshold mask by clicking on the mask button let's walk back the threshold until we see the clipped parts of the image okay that looks about right next up transition i prefer to adjust this slider until i faintly begin to see objects that are not overexposed i find that gives me an overall smoother image with only a slight impact on realism we can now disable the mask now for the reconstruction itself we can choose how much texture we want to attempt to recover i want none in this photo i don't care about texture here bloom or reconstruct i like to keep that at zero for a mix of both and lastly whether to fill the clipped areas with color or to desaturate them i usually go for almost full desaturation and as that is the behavior of film and in my opinion that is the best way to convey brightness like so i think that looks much much better and much more natural no more hard edge around the sun no more ugly cyan and no more rat piss yellow time coined by troy sobotka and frankly i can't stop using it right all we have to do now is straighten the horizon and bring back some of the color into the image we can do that very quickly just type in rotation in the search bar expand the rotate and perspective module and simply right click and drag on something that should be perfectly straight click the horizon done and done next up color for color always use color balance rgb it's also made by aurelie and pierre so we are absolutely sure it plays nice with filmic rgb again i will not get into detail in this video i'm just going to increase the global vibrance which will increase the colorfulness of the subdued colors okay i'm pretty happy with 43 oh and a pro tip always check your photo against the white background from time to time you can always do that by clicking on the little light bulb icon at the bottom it looks like the photo is a bit too warm for my taste so i can always go back to color calibration and reduce the temperature a tiny bit like so yeah i'm pretty happy with the results i think we managed to salvage the clipped areas and portray the brightness and the overall niceness of the weather of that day awesome let's check that the output color profile is set to srgb and let's move back to light table in here i would like to introduce you to another feature styles also known as presets select an image you've already developed and click create name your style i'll call it trip 1 sunny and enable all the modules and their settings you want transfer to other photos modules like highlight reconstruction which i have disabled exposure filmic rgb and color balance rgb and hit save now let's develop another photo that i took on the same day pretty much at the same spot but this time let's use the style that i've just created to give us a nice baseline i'll move back to darkroom i'll click on the styles icon and choose the style i've just created that looks great already i would just adjust the exposure a tiny bit and disable the reconstruction that we've done to the other photo simply by increasing the threshold up to about four you can always double click on the slider to reset it to the default value like so perfect back to light table we go grab the two images we've just developed and let's expand export section select the output folder select the format and resize if necessary i want the image to fit into 3000 by 3000 pixels and hit export it will take a second or two and your images are going to be ready if you're running windows 11 you can preview the files for the latest photos app it works well and it's color managed finally keep in mind that dark table will create these sidecar xmp files i recommend keeping them together with your camera native raw files as they store all the settings and tweaks we've done to the photo when we developed it that's that we developed a few photos using dark table in this touristy tour bus manner i'd like to say a personal thank you to aurelien pierre and his work on both dark table and youtube tutorials big thank you to troy sobotka as well and his work educating their color curies i will link his scriptures in the description as well i hope i wasn't too boring and hope you learned something new today see you soon bye

Channel: Studio Petrikas

Views: 96,657

Keywords: #darktable, #tutorial

Id: SiWBZ3FOMo8

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2022