I've been using darktable for a month or two and in general I feel I
can find my way around it and get good results for my photos, but every
so often I get stymied in processing a particular picture and can't get
what I feel are good results. This is especially frustrating to me when
the out of camera JPG rendering seems to be a decent starting point and
I can't even duplicate that.
Consider the following NEF and embedded preview image:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cks/tmp/darktable/DSC_1026.NEF
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cks/tmp/darktable/DSC_1026-preview4.jpg
(The preview is generated using a version of the Nikon 'neutral' picture
style that increases the sharpening and reduces the contrast slightly.)
I was unable to get a result that didn't blow sections of the sky
out while still keeping the foreground light enough (and maintaining
contrast). Several experiments wound up with the sky too dark, too
contrasty, or both. I could probably have fixed this with sufficient
use of masks, but I think that I'm missing something in basic curve
processing. And in general I'd like to work out a relatively easy and
fast way to get to a starting point similar to the preview JPEG; the
preview image still needs work and so if it'd take me a lot of work to
get even there, the photo probably isn't worth it at all.
(In general I've found that the darktable base curve(s) are often much
more aggressive about blowing highlights than I'd like. My attempts to
fiddle with the normal Nikon base curve to fix this have generally been
unsuccessful. I've had more luck resetting the base curve to linear and
then applying the 'med contrast' tone curve preset, but even that's not
fully there.)
Thanks in advance to anyone who feels like taking a shot at this.
(I should mention that I'm currently using the git tip version of
darktable.)
- cks
PS: I know that this is not a great picture in general but I think it
makes a good illustration of the disconnect between the camera
preview image and what I can achieve in darktable with my current
understanding (probably better than a better picture, honestly).
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