Thank you all for the tips on using tone equalizer. I am still digesting them, but have made a lot of progress.
I am using DT 3.2 so that I can compare zone system and tone equalizer. I understand that tone equalizer in v. 3.4 is a lot better, but I am putting off upgrading to it due to the lack of zone system. I took a sample picture to edit, with a good range of black to white. I want to make it look like the classic B&W street photography with "inky blacks". In zone system I pushed the dark shadows down toward the black to get this effect. I also pushed the highlights toward the whites, but not as much. There are 8 points on the zone strip that one can vary. I am going for the look of "inky blacks" over preserving all the detail. In tone equalizer using the default mask type of guided filter and spreading the mask histogram as much as I could, I got about 3.5 points on the curve that could modify the picture. I could not get anything near to the result from zone system. Too grey. I tried choosing 'no' in preserve details (in the masking tab), as Juan suggested. Now the mask spans all 8 EV and I was able to get very close to my picture from zone system. So my conclusions are 1. It is not certain that tone equalizer is mature since the last big update is only from late December. 2. If tone equalizer is not yet mature, it is premature to deprecate the zone system module. 3. The tone equalizer "preserve details" option of "no" that basically replicates the zone system/ tone curve is very buried. Maybe it should be on the simple tab. To be honest I find the tone curve hard to use and was initially smitten with the simple tab on the tone equalizer. 4. Learning the tone equalizer is much harder than the zone system (thank you for the hand holding). This is a barrier for beginners; let them get their sea legs using the zone system as they learn techniques that go beyond basic sliders. 5. Obviously in using the tone equalizer, there are other images where the intention is more of preserving detail while not adjusting tone values more than the detail mask allows. I can think of documentary cases like bird photos and scientific images. 6. The developers should keep the zone system in my opinion. Tanya Riseman ____________________________________________________________________________ darktable user mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-user+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org
