How to EFFECTIVELY Add CONTRAST In Darktable

greetings YouTube there are so many tools and methods and ways of doing things within dark table that sometimes it's really confusing un knowing what the right tool for the job is and I certainly found that to be the case when learning to add contrast to my photos and dark table because well there are so many ways to add contrast in dark table it's like well which one do I freaking use in this video I intend to demystify the process of adding contrast within dark table and hopefully make it easier to understand as well so stick around grab some coffee and together we can rule the world of dark [Music] [Music] table so in tools like Adobe White Room adjusting contrast is often very easy and straightforward so we can often just increase contrast by adjusting the contrast slider we could also adjust the white or black points of the image and we could also increase the clarity or Texture slider as well so dark table can do these very same things with even more power and control but the methods of doing such things aren't as readily as apparent and we can do many things to achieve the same goal so how do we actually effectively add contrast and how do we know when a particular method is best in this video I'm going to show you how to use the tone mapping modules like sigmoid and filmic RGB to add simple but effective contrast how to use the color balance RGB module to add contrast of more control and to expand a dynamic range of your photograph and how to use the contrast equalizer to add Clarity and texture to your photographs and lastly when you should pick a particular method over another all right so we're in dark table now and this first photograph here is an image I took of some beautiful orchid flowers and I'm actually entering a local photographic competition for taking photographs of orchids added the display and this is one of my photographs so I really like this Photograph because I think it has some very beautiful Hues of yellow and purple and green and in particular the yellow contrasts the purple very nicely and there's some really nice softness to the colors in this Photograph I think that this is an excellent candidate to add some simple contrast pop all right so I've done some basic image processing to get this image into its current state and what I've done so far is add some color with the color balance RGB module I've also added some sharpening as well of the diffus and sharpen module with the lens de blur medium preset and if You' like to check out more information on the basic workflow I use to process images see the video card above so according to the developers of dark table the uh recommended method of adding contrast is actually not through the tone mapping modules like sigmoid or filming RGB and in sigmo here we have a contrast slider what they typically recommend is to go to a module like the color balance RGB module and play around with the various different sliders like perceptual Brilliance the shadows and highlights we we'll get to that later or the contrast slider and we can actually add contrast in a very controlled way doing that but sometimes I actually think that using the sigmoid modules contrast slider delivers very effective results and it doesn't distort the color in any way all right so let's face it sometimes in image processing we don't want to spend a gargantuan amount of time in like 15 or 20 different sliders to get the result we want we just want to adjust one slider that allows us to get a really effective result and a really quick Manner and that's exactly what the sigmoid modules contrast sliders allows us to do so in adding contrast with the sigmoid module I typically recommend adjusting the slider to somewhere like maybe 1.65 1.7 where it's a good amount of contrast but not too much contrast and I'm going to go ahead and add 1. seven here as you can see going back and forth that adds a really nice amount of contrast pop and it brought out the colors as well now a quick note on the colors if you go ahead and use another module like color balance RGB and you start adjusting contrast we will adjust the contrast without the uh color coming up with it as well and we'll have to make further modifications to the color to get it to look right to our taste whereas if you go ahead and use sigmoid and add contrast the color comes up with it it's very simple It's very effective it looks really organic and it looks really nice so I do recommend using the contrast slider in sigmoid because it delivers great results all right so we're setting the sigmoid M modules contrast back to default State another thing we might want to do in Dark table is add some simple local contrast and there's two ways we can do that in dark table and I'm going to quickly go over both of them and also share my favorite method as well so to describe what local contrast is I'm going to call upon this uh web article here Link in the description below and this article describes local contrast as small scale or local contrast is that between much smaller adjacent areas of the image improve this and you've made the Shadow and highlight areas where contrast is most compressed appear broader and we're going to go ahead and add some local contrast to this Photograph here all right so let's add some local contrast to this Photograph and the first way we can do that is via the local contrast module I'm going to go ahead and turn it on at default State and we can adjust these sliders to our taste if needed I turn it off turn it back on again as you can see it adds a nice amount of local contrast to this Photograph but one thing worth noting is that when we do that the uh balance of the color is a little bit more subdued in comparison to the contrast so in this case if we using this module we'll have to go back to the color balance RGB module and adjust the color how however the method of adding local contrast that I'm most fond of is actually with the diffuse and sharpen module if you go into the uh diffusion sharpen module there's an excellent default setting called or preset called local contrast I'm going to go ahead and add that here when we do that it adds a really nice amount of local contrast and it also brings up the color contrast as well giving us very good-looking and organic results so sometimes in image processing simple contrast sliders doesn't give us enough control to give us the look we really want this image here is an example of that and I took this photograph in the middle of a very hazy and blurry snowstorm and this image is very diffused and has very little contrast and actually if you look up at the waveform up here we can see that the uh image information occupies a very small plane in the waveform showing how much little contrast it has so if I was processing this photograph in software like Adobe Lightroom the way I'd go about that is by adjusting the exposure adjusting the white and black points to expand the dynamic range of this Photograph and what I'd like to achieve is is I'd like that snow to be a lot brighter and be closer to White and I also like to add some contrast to the trees as well and we can go ahead and Achieve that here but we're going to actually use the contrast adjustments within the uh color balance RGB module so before we go ahead and expand the dynamic r of this photograph with the color balance RGB module the first thing I want to do is actually adjust the exposure and the intent of doing this is to bring the midtones to a point to where I want them so that I can go ahead and actually increase the brightness of the highlights and decrease the brightness of the Shadows to add that dynamic range so I'm going to go ahead and adjust the exposure and I'm going to bring this up to about about 1.3 here we go all right now that we got the exposure set where we want it to we can go into the color balance RGB module and M with the perceptual Brilliance grading all right so the beautiful thing about color balance RGB is it gives us a lot of really powerful control on the way we add contrast so we can go ahead and adjust the perceptual Brilliance grading here to expand the dynamic range of this Photograph expanding this waveform I first think it needs more adjustment in the shadows than it does highlights so I'm going to start by P pull down the Shadows adding some contrast back to those trees yeah so probably somewhere around yeah like 32 or so I'm going to bring up the highlights as well making the snow and haze just a bit brighter there we go so this brought a lot of character to this Photograph taking a very dull photograph and transforming it to a really exceptional photograph just by adding some contrast all right so one final photograph for you guys and you know software like Adobe Li arm have sliders for adjusting Clarity and texture and we can do the very same things in dark table with even more power and control and this beautiful image of these Autumn Leaves of icy snow is an excellent candidate for the addition of texture and Clarity all right so I'm going to go ahead and search for the contrast equalizer in the search bar turning it on and in the contrast equalizer there are three tabs there's the Luma tab the chroma Tab and the edges tab we're going to spend most of our time in the Luma tab but I'm going to make a quick mention to the chroma tab as well all right so what the contrast equalizer does it allows us to add contrast to various different size structures within our photograph on the left side of the curve we can add contrast to larger more coarse structures on the right side we can add contrast to the finer smaller structures within our photograph all right so first things first is we can actually use our Mouse's scroll wheel to change the size of the circle making it smaller or bigger and what that means is is that when we make adjustments the amount of this curve that will be affected will change so if we actually make the circle as large as possible and we adjust the curve all at once this is actually akin to adjusting the clarity slider and Lightroom all right so what I really like to use the contrast equalizer for is adding some larger level macro contrast and some smaller level micro contrast at the same time and leave a little bit of a dip in the middle all right so to add the macro contrast I'm going to go to the left side of the curve here and I'm going to pull this up just a little bit adding that contrast yep that's really nice and then I'm going to go to the right side of the curve here and I'm going to add that texture as well yeah that that brought out like the texture and the the lines of the leaves and then the icy snow as well you know the contrast equalizers added a lot of characters to this Photograph and allowed us to adjust the the contrast of this photograph with a lot of control all right so one last thing here really quick is we can go to the chroma Tab and we can increase the color contrast as well and the way I like to do that is by going to the left side here of the curve and adjusting the macro color contrast bringing that up just a little bit which just brings out the differences between various different colors in the photograph and in this case it brings out the differences between the Reds yellows and oranges and just adds nice bit of extra character to the photograph as you can see dark table's array of incredibly powerful tools allows us of great control to add contrast depth and pop to our photographs once we understand how to apply the tools effectively I hope that this video demystified the process of effectively adding contrast and dark table hey so let me know in the comment section below what you found valuable and intriguing in this video if you have any other ideas on how to effectively add contrast and dark table that I didn't cover let me know on the comments if you disagree with anything I said also let me know because all opinions are welcome and lastly if you have any pain points in dark table let me know as well because it gives me great ideas for future videos hey so I hope you found the content of this video valuable and intriguing if you did leave a like it really helps out my channel also if You' like to check out more content like this subscribe to my channel and lastly if you like to check out some of my photographic work see the link description below hope to see you in another [Music] [Music] video

Channel: Nick Long

Views: 2,595

Keywords: Darktable, Darktable 4.6, Lightroom vs Darktable, Darktable Tutorial, Color Balance RGB, Sigmoid, Contrast Equalizer

Id: iwwzLH4U6u0

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024