or “If one slider is not enough”

Diligent readers of our small blog series are already aware of the blending feature that darktable offers as part of many modules. Instead of just handing over their result to the subsequent module in pixelpipe, “blending modules” take a moment to reconsider. Based on the blend setting they will take their original output together with their input and do a re-processing. As an example refer to here, where we took blend mode “overlay” with module “lowpass” to do shadow recovery.

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Outdoor photographers are often confronted with unfavorable light conditions. This often entails too high contrast. Two of the most frequent consequences are blown highlights and deep shadows in your digital images. Overexposed highlights are challenging to repair in digital post post-processing, still darktable offers a decent set of valuable tools as long as you take your pictures in raw (see Jo’s blog post “ why you want raw ”). Fortunately, it’s much easier to take care of the deep shadows.

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or “How to bring the jungle back”

Since its early beginnings darktable has a tone curve module that is able to alter the gray level distribution of an image. Recently we did an enhancement: tone curve is now able to control the full Lab color space with separate curves for the L, a and b channel. People who are used to curve tools in RGB, at first might get puzzled over the results of these three curves; they show marked differences to the typical RGB curve. Especially a and b channels need to be dealt with in the right way; not doing so will give you strong off-colors. To spare you frustration here are some explanations and examples.

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