darktable ep 038 - The Split Toning module

[@marcin.sobocinski]

Dziękujemy.

[@audio2u]

My apologies... I thought I'd relied to this.... Thank you so much! And have a very merry Christmas!

[@marcin.sobocinski]

OK. I made a decision to give up on Adobe altogether. Darktable looks like the best choice for raw processing. Now I am binge watching all your videos... still like a 100 to go 😀. Thank you for all the material. I started to read Darktable manual, am around 90th page but it's a pain in the a.s in comparison with your nice, perfectly paced tutorials.

[@audio2u]

Hahaha! Thanks for the kind words, and I can assure you, once you get your hands dirty with darktable, you will wonder why you stayed with LR for as long as you did! It is incredibly powerful. As for the back catalogue of videos, many features will have now changed from what I demonstrated in some of those videos. Frustratingly, I can't point to which videos are still relevant and which are not. But if you do work through everything, you will eventually come upon the features which have changed.

[@RicoResolves]

Good video Bruce 😉👍.

[@audio2u]

Thanks Rico!

[@jaredacrean]

Great to see Darktable getting some love

[@emrg777]

Your most welcome...it was a good exercise to confirm just how it was all tied together...Cheers

[@petergulliver3225]

Good on yer Bruce! As ever a very informative video.

[@audio2u]

Thanks! 😃

[@emrg777]

Great video Bruce. I use the split tone module on colour for colour cast. First I use the colour picker, the new one allows you to select the whole image so I can get the average pixel value of the whole image. Its easy by subtraction from 255 to calculate the inverse colour of that average. Now I use the split tone module...and set both colours to that inverse colour. Set the bias to 50 and compression to 0. This is applied with an overlay or softlight blend mode and can be tweaked with opacity....This simulates the trick of using a layer of the inverse color taken from the average color of the initial image blended to remove or minimize colour casting from an image....not a 100% fix but its quick and it usually produces a decent result.

[@wido123123]

I'm not sure if would be the same result, but I use the "haze removal". Even if there's no haze, this module greatly improve colors. I will try your method as well

[@audio2u]

Thanks Todd. I watched the video you referenced in your fb post.... very cool trick! Gonna have to investigate your darktable variation of it!

[@emrg777]

@@audio2u Ya I'm not sure its completely the same...if you could pick the color in the colorize module I think you would be able to emulate this completely.....but it is close enough to likely help sometimes or at least as a starting point maybe after wb ??

[@emrg777]

@@wido123123 I use it quite often as well Wido it can give really deep rich colours...you do have to dial down the opacity sometimes though as it can create color shifts I find....yellow and orange tinges appear in the highlights or at least I have found that ....

[@joaovtaveira]

5:05 or double click on the balance slider.

[@justmythought7658]

I remember an old tip: If you want to print a black & white image, give it a very light blue tint, so the printer has a bigger tonal range to work with. Not sure, this is still the case. Very old tip.

[@audio2u]

Interesting!

[@joaovtaveira]

Another great explanatory video from you, congrets once more again!

[@joaovtaveira]

Sorry but why those 48s of black screen?! I'm sure it was a mistake but it's not serious!

[@audio2u]

Oh crap.... I had not noticed that! At least it was right at the end and not in the middle! Apologies for that.

[@joaovtaveira]

@@audio2u that's ok.

[@burnout9069]

Nice to see an Aussie here offering wisdom. Side note: I found the coment about your choice in contrasting subject to location interesting. Back in my school (tafe) days studying photography. I found I would also naturally steer towards contrasting settings. Much to the surprise of other students and my teacher. Then in B/W if the lighting was to contrasting, I would developed to go the other direction to pull it all out. Never one to follow trends, but I found it interesting all the same. All this was at the start of the autofocus era. I could only imagine what my teacher would say about split toning today? 😁

[@audio2u]

Thanks Dan!

[@wido123123]

I use it for the modern "orange & teal" look. I lower the saturation for the orange (highs) and increase it for the cyan-bluish (shadows). And it helps making the image a little bit more dramatic, and it's a good trick when it's a lot of foliage since create a nice contrast with shadows (changes a little bit from the greenish to the bluish)

[@audio2u]

Nice one Wido! I might have to give that a try!

[@tjohnson9027]

Great video. When I open a new raw image DT already has a history stack of edits, how do I keep that from happening. I just want the base image upon opening, I looked through some videos and can't seem to figure it out. Thanks for any help. Just point me to the right video maybe lol.

[@audio2u]

I hear ya! It does auto apply things like orientation (which isn't doing you any harm... It's simply reading the camera body orientation from the embedded EXIF metadata) and base curve. If you don't want base curve, and assuming you are at least on 2.6 or later, there is an option in the preferences to not auto apply the base curve. Uncheck that box. Hope this helps.

[@tjohnson9027]

@@audio2u Yea im on the latest version. Thanks for the reply, I'll check all that out.

[@joaovtaveira]

@@audio2u it also auto applies sharpening that, supposedly, can be altered in a similar way that in the case of base curve applying. In my case those options don't even appear though.

[@philsilverman7431]

Love the channel Bruce and I'm learning lots, many thanks, would you please produce a video on how to watermark in Darktable please?

[@audio2u]

Thanks Phil. Yep, it's on the list!

[@wrzlbrnth4092]

bruce can you do a video on how to find and backup the darktable catalog. Thanks

[@audio2u]

I'll add that to the list, Hans!

[@carlgusler1554]

Thanks for asking, Hans. I need to set up my own backups. Until Bruce brings us the main course insight, here is an appetizer: Look for a file named library.db in a folder/directory named darktable. I'm on Win10, and I found mine in C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\darktable. Chapter 1 of the on-line Darktable manual explains how to control where it goes. I hope that helps!

[@wrzlbrnth4092]

@@carlgusler1554 Hi Carl. The Mac works totally different than Windows. The location of the library is not in the same place as in Windows. After a lot of searching and code peeping, on the Mac, the library and the call routines are all in the darktable application folder and when you click the application you open the library. SO for the MAC what I found out is that the directions on the users guide dont apply. If you back up the entire applications folder on the Mac you will also back up the library, I tested this and it works. I am still working to just back up the library but I may give up because its just too much work and the above method works for the mac.

[@emrg777]

@@audio2u It would be nice to have it laid out nicely. I did some reading and here are a couple of points from how I understood it...at least for Windows backing up the Appdata file will be the best as it has essentially all of the files you need except darktable.css if you have modified this....Keyboardrc has your info related to any keyboard shortcuts you set, darktablerc contains all the setting that you normally apply in the preferences and a few extra ones from what I can see. Darktable.css or which ever css file you use in in the Darktable program directory so if you have messed with fonts or scrollbars you will need this too. Data.db in contains your presets, tags etc and that sort of information so its a key to have. The luts and styles folders in Appdata speak for themselves. The library I feel is of course nice to have but if you have sidecars you can easily recreate it and from what I read in the manual you need to be careful if you were to say backup your library and then continue to edit photos for say a month, if you were to restore from that library and if you did not have DT set to look for new XMP files in preferences then the library setting would take precedence and there is a chance if you did not have the most recent edits and your xmp files may get updated with old information. Of course if you do not have sidecars then your library is essential to maintain your edits and you will still lose any edits done between backups (again unless you have sidecars) but if you have them then you can easily rebuild it and in this case it is primarily has a thumbnail management role....I think I will test this out to confirm so what I am saying is not the gospel but from several posts and the manual it seems to me like this is how it works...I am basing this on the last paragraph of the manual entry for sidecars...www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/sidecar_files.html I will test it out and see if indeed it can happen that way......

[@audio2u]

Wow, thanks for the detailed explanation, Todd! I will credit you for the info when I do that episode.

[@tiestolqa146]

I wish you did a blue and pink split tone tutorial to get a cyberpunk theme.

[@audio2u]

Well, hopefully I covered the mechanics of how the module works so you can now do that! :)

[@joaovtaveira]

Strange, when I turn to 0 both saturation sliders to my image remains in color.

[@audio2u]

Yes, because that slider is controlling the saturation of the split toning, not the saturation of your image.

[@joaovtaveira]

@@audio2u but when you do it, it turns black and white.

[@audio2u]

What timecode?

[@bbawt1]

Looks like Bruce used the Color Zones to turn the image B&W earlier in the process.

[@audio2u]

Ahhhh, yes, that is probably the missing link! Thanks Brian.

[@johanouweneel]

wd40!!!! If you id not mention the billboard, i probably wouldn't have noticed it....hmmmm..me being HSP, i probably would.:-) :-).Great video!!

[@audio2u]

Thanks!

[@joaovtaveira]

Compress, not compression.

[@audio2u]

Yes, but according to Miriam-Webster, the "intransitive verb" of compress... is compression. :)

[@cosmo0080]

did u know Teagan can mean "attractive", "beautiful" and or "perfect". am i going to have just listen to the next video because she will be to distracting lol thank u for this i did not know what split toning was until now

[@audio2u]

Cosmo, no, I did not know that, but she wears it well! Split toning is great! I love it on monochrome images.

[@C00ltronix]

After 12:13 it gets really, really boring ;-)

[@audio2u]

Sorry about that.

[@demus8757]

I can understand you want to have money for the work you do, I truly understand that but this is getting ridiculous. Soon you talk more about Patreon than about the videos themselves. Ihave enjoined the first 30 or so videos till you started with that. Now I don't know if I continue watching them. Maybe I will just see what videos you still have after this one and only if the subject is interesting for me I will watch it, the others I will just skip. I hate that cause I really love darktable and want to know more about it. You started of with great explanations of parts of the program but as said, now it is just about how to get more money. If I can be bold, you messed up. At least for me.