HOW to USE the TONE EQUALIZER in darktable

hey guys what's going on everybody my name is Rico riches and welcome back to my channel in this episode I'm going to show you guys how the tone equalizer module works and I'm going to show you guys how to use the mask version of this one as well let's go and here is the image that we're going to work with I'm going to show you guys the end result right now by moving this slider to the right and the reason I can do this is because I've already taken a snapshot off the last step so that way I can just move a slider from left to right so this is very dark very dull you don't see anything of the motorcycle over here and then in a new version we can in her face is much brighter as well I'm going to make sure that this photo is available for you guys in the description down below I've talked it through and I'm going to make sure that a link to our Instagram is in the description down below as well I've met her les here we did a photo shoot and this is one of the photos that we've taken so let's continue right so what I've done is I've made a duplicate and that way I could just start over and still have the original file that I've had before so make sure that your step is set to orientation and then hit the compress history stack if you open up this photo darktable will automatically apply a base curve and that's not what I want to use today so let's continue there are three ways that you can use the tone equalizer module I'm going to open it up I'm going to activate it the first way is by using a simple tab the second way by using a advanced tab in the third way by using the masking tab the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to hover around the image to see where the pixels are so we've got the highlights which are under minus one we've got the bike minus 3.6 we've got the tire minus four point four and we've got minus four point two on the ground which is pretty dark as well then the darkest area is minus 4.9 and her pans are minus four point zero now what you can do is just move these sliders around as I'm doing right now to increase the exposure in the pixel area which connects to these values over here that's one way you can use a different way as well I'm going to reset the parameter you can just place your mouse on the part that you want to increase or decrease and then scroll the mouse wheel button away from you to increase the exposure or towards you to decrease the exposure obviously I want to make the tire a little bit more bright but watch what happens on the right side you see that everything is going upwards in huge increments now if you want to make sure that the steps aren't as big let's reset that you can hit the control and then scroll it and now you see that it's starting to increase more gradually than when you just move your mouse wheel button around like this so that's one way to work with this image and its own equalizer module let me reset that let's go to the Advanced tab and in the Advanced tab you have a histogram you've got a couple of nodes and we've got one two three four five maybe six nodes that cover the area of the image the histogram you can grab a node and just pull it up and you see that the exposure is being increased and if you move around the image you will see a line moving from left to right or from right to left which shows you where in this curve are the values that you're looking at right now so obviously the bike is very dark so it's more in this area and if I move to the highlights you see that it's moving on the right side of the histogram and of the Advanced tab so let me reset that okay so somehow dark table crashed I couldn't get the histogram up again I'm not quite sure what it is I've shut dark table down myself it didn't crash automatically but the tone equalizer module did make some pretty weird moves because suddenly it's now gone the histogram that is and even if I activate it and deactivate it I still didn't see a histogram so I shut darktable down I've if you know why this book are cure so let me know in the comment section down below and let's just quickly move on with this image so we're back in the tone equalizer module I've restarted darktable and now we've got a histogram again so let's move on to the masking tab and we've got a lot of options over here that I'm going to talk you guys through but we're going to start with this part over here and basically what this says it's it's the mask histogram span between the first and last deciles the central line shows the average orange bars appear at extrema if clipping occurs what that means is that it covers this area from this side to that side and if you go past minus 8 or plus 0 you will see a orange line what I want to do is I want to utilize this area as good as possible so for that I'm going to the masking tab I'm going to move around the mask exposure compensation if I move it to the right you see that things are starting to clip and if I move it to the left you see that it's now being dragged more to the left side which means that the histogram is changing as well now this is very compact very narrow so to change that you can use the mask contrast compensation and it says use this to counter the averaging effect of the guided filter and dilate the mask contrast around minus 4 exposure this allows to spread the exposure histogram over more channels for a better control of the exposure correction and that's exactly what we want to do so if you're moving to the right side it expands and if you move it to the left side it narrows down so let's increase it a little bit and let's go to the Advanced tab and see what happens and there you go so now we've got more area which is being covered I want to extend this a little bit so I'm going to play around with it a little bit there we go I think this looks absolutely fine so now we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 nodes that we can work with we can stretch this out a little bit more about for the sake of this tutorial I'm just going to keep this as is I'm going back to the masking tab and if you experience halos by adjusting this image you can use the smoothing diameter and if you want to feather everything you can use the edges refinement and feathering and one tip I want to show you guys if you start to adjust this image so let's start with that so we've got minus six point four six point five the wheels minus six it shows where it is right now we've got her which is minus three we've got our face which is in a minus two and then we've got the highlights over here so let's increase the brightness of the bike so I'm going to move this upwards there we go going to do this manually let's increase the highlights a little bit as well there we go and now the bike is already a lot more bright than it was before so we've really brought it out in comparison to what it was before I'm going to bring it out just a little bit more and what you need to do is if you do this you want to make sure that the curve is very smooth and you don't have big drops like this because that can really affect your image and create some nasty halo effects or some harshness or whatever you want to call it so let's bring that back and this one as well there we go and now that we've used the tone equalizer module and we've used the mask version to spread everything out the histogram to make sure that we've got more nodes to work with we're going to finish up on this image and I'm going to show you guys how so now that we've done that I'm going to close this one down and we're going to move on to the next with sixty tone curved module I'm going to activate it I'm going to use two instances the first one for the overall image so I want to bring up the shadows a little bit and the mid-tones I'm going to keep the highlights as is I don't see any clipping but if you want to see if something is under or overexposed you can use the symbol down below is the third from the left which is the toggle over underexposed indication let's activate it you see that we've got a few overexposed areas over here maybe if we drop this point down they start to disappear there we go and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a second instance in new instance I'm going to scroll up a little bit for you guys so that you can see this and I'm going to create a mask and I'm not going to create any mask I'm going to create a drawn mask I'm going to use the ellipse I'm going to put it on her face now let's scroll in on our face a little bit you can move these points inwards and outwards by just clicking on them and if you want to rotate the entire mask just hit the control and then move it around like you see happening right now we're going to decrease the feathering a little bit by hitting the shift and then scrolling the mouse wheel but away from me going to move the mask a little bit more upwards there we go let's zoom out again and now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to increase the brightness of her face a little bit because that's where I want the focus to go in this image now let me scroll down and click this symbol which is the show in edit mask elements there we go and you see that it looks kind of funny but we're going to address that by just increasing the feathering radius there we go so now it's gone maybe a little bit less yeah that looks great now let me show you guys before and after so watch what happens to her face I'm going to deactivate it now her face is a little bit more dull I'm going to activate it now her face is a little bit more bright and when you look at this image your focus is immediately going to her face and that's exactly what I want even though it's a very great bike to look at as well now I'm just going to finish this one up I'm going to add some local contrast and I don't want to add too much contrast because you see that it's starting to get under exposed again and when you shoot a photo of a female you want her face to be a little bit more soft guys portraits from guys you can make sure that the face has a little bit more texture it's a little bit more character but with women you want to flatten it a little bit you want to soften it make it very elegant so I'm going to address this just a little bit because I want to have a little bit more contrast in this image but not too much I'm going to hit this symbol the uniformly one and I'm just going to decrease the opacity to % so we still added some local contrast but not too much and I don't think I want to show you guys it's a tip talk gave me talk prior he made a couple of builds for me from dark table as well you guys might have seen him in a comment section or on different foreign stuff like that and what he said was he said that you can use the color balance module to address the white balance by just using the color picker for the highlights I'm going to show you guys that so let's search for the color balance module let's open it up and let's activate it and you see that we've got a couple of color Pickers over here I'm going to click this one and now you see that the entire image is being selected and I don't want the entire image to be selected I just want the widest part of the image to be selected to change the white balance a little bit so now it's more natural it's got a little bit of a blue cast but it was a fairly cold day as well so that really matches with the day that we have while shooting this photo and now for the final touch I'm going to use two more modules first I'm going to address the noise let me show you guys because we've got some noise in the colors over here it looks horrible but it's not so what I'm going to do is I'm going to find the D noise module I'm going to use the profile one I'm going to activate it boom now the noise is gone the thing with this is that if you use the D noise module things start to get a little bit more soft now I'm going to show you guys a way to sharpen it without using the sharpen module instead what we're going to do is we're going to use the Lopes module now let me zoom out again to fit the screen there we go I'm going to activate Lopes module I've got to increase the radius to make everything very very blurry and you can do this to around 124 or whatever you like but make sure you put the contrast on zero you put the saturation on zero and now it looks absolutely horrible your image is gone you're thinking what am i doing but we're going to use the uniformly and we're going to change the blend mode from normal to overlay there we go and that has sharpened the image and you can sharpen it some more by increasing the contrast by move this to the left or to the right decrease it but I'm going to move it to the left just increase the sharpening a little bit not too much and I'm going to keep the brightness this is because I like how this looks but I am going to increase the saturation a little bit because that's what I want to do if you have any difficulties with this because things are starting to slow down just hit the right mouse button and then fill in the values manually for instance and that already looks a lot better let me show you guys before and after I'm going to deactivate the module so here's the image without the lopes module activated now let's do it again and here we have the image with the lopes module activated we're going to click this toggle over an underexposed indicator so that it's not activated anymore because I saw a little bit of red dots and some blue dots and then the final thing basic adjustments we're going to activate it and I'm going to increase the black level to make sure that this is touching the left side so I'm just going to increase it a little bit and I'm going to increase some saturation again just a little bit and that's it here we have the end result let me take a snapshot let me show you guys what we started with once more so we've got the orientation 1 step 8 I'm going to click on the snapshot I'm going to move this slider from the right to the left and we've really brought this image to life and in comparison I'm going to show you guys the JPEG right now so on the right side is the JPEG that my camera has created so this is straight out of the camera and then on the left side is what we've done to the image using darktable I think that the image that we created with darktable is far more better and usable than the image that the camera has made by itself this was shot on a Panasonic th5 but it's one of the reasons why I always shoot in RAW to make sure that I am my own director of the images that I process and I hope I explain the tone equalizer module to you guys very quickly very swiftly and in a way that everybody can understand it if I went too fast let me know in the comment section down below if you've got questions let me know in the comment section down below as well I'll try to answer them as soon as possible or people out of my commune we'll respond to them because the darktable community is very active and very helpful when it comes to questions I loved working on this image thank you very much once again for using this image I'm going to make sure that I'm going to put her Instagram in the description down below I'm going to make sure that this photo is available for you guys in the description down below for this week there's only one more thing left for me to say which is make love to the like button consider subscribing if you haven't already hit that Bell button to be the first to be notified when I drop in a video and all the next time do [Music]

Channel: Rico Resolves

Views: 15,604

Keywords: How to edit RAW images, RAW Photo Viewer, darktable vs lightroom, darktable download, darktable presets, darktable 3, darktable 3.0, 2020 photo editing, dark table, lightroom alternative, darktable hdr, lightroom alternative kostenlos, best alternative to lightroom, darktable 3.0.1., working with models, dark table 3.0, dark table tutorial, darktable tutorial for beginners, darktable tone equalizer, how to use the tone equalizer in darktable

Id: fjT8wNOSeEk

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020