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An Opportunity


An Opportunity

To help (and attract) new users!

I think we are at an interesting time for digital imaging. I came across this graph on Petapixel the other day that showed camera sales from 1947 - 2014:

CIPA Camera Production 1947-2014

There was explosive growth driven by the Compact Digital market right around 2000. Likely driven by the advent of those inexpensive compact digital cameras and the ubiquity of home computers. It was relatively cheap to get a decent digital camera and the cost per photo suddenly dropped to a previously unheard of amount (compared to shooting film).

This meant that substantially more people were now able to take and share photographs.

That precarious plummet after 2011 seems frightful for the photography industry as a whole, though. The numbers from the graph would seem to indicate that production in 2014 dropped to below the values from 2001.

Petapixel had a follow-up article where photographer Sven Skafisk added in smartphone sales using data from Gartner Inc.:

Camera Sales with Smartphones

If that graph doesn’t describe an industry in the throes of change, then I don’t know what does. It looks like the camera industry is less in decline and more about being in a big transition phase.

So What?

So why would this matter? Because now, more than ever, there is a large amount of people who may be interested in learning to process their photographs in some way. As the costs and barrier to entry to photography as a hobby get lower we see more and more people finding the fun and joy of photography.

Couple that with the fact that the modern language of media consumption is primarily visual and I see a great opportunity brewing.

I feel this is important to us as free software users as it gives us an opportunity to help make people aware of free software (and its ideas). New hobbyists will invariably look for an inexpensive way to get started processing photos and will almost always run into various free software projects at some point in the search.

It’s entirely on us as a community to make sure that there will be good resources to learn from. If we do a good enough job, some of those folks will realize that free software more than meets their needs. If we do a really good job, some of those people will become valuable parts of our communities.

Articles Have Comments Now Also

So I have now also enabled the comments for more than just blog posts. They should now be working just fine on full articles as well. So feel free to head over to Ian Hex’s neat Luminosity Masking in darktable tutorial and leave a comment to let him know what you thought of it! (Or any of the other articles, too.)

A Forum


A Forum

For Discourse, if you will...

After much hard work, that basically consisted of me annoying darix as often as possible, I am glad to say that we finally have a Discourse instance set up! Super Big thank you to darix for all the help!

So What?

What does this mean? For starters, we now have a forum/community in place that we can start building around photography and free software.

A neat side-effect of this forum is that we now also have a way to embed forum threads as comments on posts (only blogposts at the moment - I’ll add them to articles shortly).

At the bottom of any blog post you should now either see a series of conversations happening with a Continue Discussion or a link to Start Discussion. Either of those buttons will take you to the actual forum to continue the conversation. Replies to topics that are tied to posts will show up as a conversation at the bottom of the post (check the bottom of this post).

The site is open and live at the moment (if a bit bare-bones). Feel free to drop by and create an account, comment on things, start new topics, etc. I’m testing things out at the moment to see if I need to possibly bump the server specs in order to handle the loads (most likely). (In the course of writing this, I went ahead and bumped the server RAM to 2GB - so it should run smoothly).

All the Articles


All the Articles

My God, It's Full of Articles

I spent a little time struggling conceptually with how I wanted to categorize the different types of content I am planning for this site. As I had previously noted, I was already done with creating a blog post type of content, and had noted that I was working on how to show tutorials and ‘showcase’ types of posts.

Apparently, I had the answer in mind when I created that graphic last month. If you notice the two other types of content I am working on, Tutorials and Showcase, are both listed as types Articles on the graphic.

site content types - Blog, Tutorials, Showcase

Of course. There will only be two distinct types of content from the viewpoint of the site, blogposts and articles. I will then use the features of the static-site generator I use for this site, metalsmith, to manage the content presentation (tutorials, showcase, etc). This will be handled through collections in metalsmith.

So at the end of the day, even though there will be a section of Tutorials and Showcase or whatever else I come up with (or someone else), the bottom line is that the base content object will be an Article.

I like this approach, as it leaves a large amount of flexibility while maintaining a nice sense of simplicity. (Anything that lowers the barrier to writing and publishing material is good in my book).

An Aside on Collections in Metalsmith

This is just a note to myself in case I forget what I was on about with collections.

There are basically two ways of associating an article with a collection, through metadata on the file and through a matching pattern during compile time. Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, you can’t do them both at the same time for the same collection type.

Metadata

Doing it through metadata assocation only requires that in the front-matter of the file, the collection type is called out, like collection: tutorial. For example, here’s a sample of the front-matter for this blog post:

---
date: 2015-03-30T17:31:36-05:00
title: "All the Articles"
sub-title: "My God, It's Full of Articles"
lede-img: "M31 - Adam Evans.jpg"
author: "Pat David"
collection: blogposts
layout: blog-posts.hbt
---

In this case, the post will be added to the collection, blogposts.

Pattern Matching

In the index.js for the site, there’s a section for using collections where a pattern can be specified to add files:

.use( collections({
    articles: {
        pattern: 'articles/*/index.html',
        sortBy: 'date',
        reverse: true
        }
}))

This glob pattern will simply add all the posts in a folder in the articles/ directory to the collection, articles.

In fact, this is actually how I want to collect all articles on the site for archive purposes. I’ll want a page on the site that will list all of the articles that will be published, regardless of further classifications. I feel that it is helpful for people searching for information to have a single page listing of all the material on the site (I did something similar with my blog by adding an archive page).

Happy!

So these pieces sort of falling into place make me happy because it means that I am much closer to having a setup how I would like it to be. I can get started writing these other article types now without worrying as much about the back end.

Rather, I only need to focus on creating the landing pages for the content type (tutorials/, showcase/, etc…). Yay! More time to spend on writing new stuff!

Discourse

Discourse Logo

I had mentioned it previously, but darix on #darktable has been an immense help in testing out Discourse for me. He has gotten it to a point where it mostly works so the only thing holding me back from getting it rolled out is deciding how/where to host the instance.

If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, I’m all ears! To use Darix’s discourse, I’ll need openSUSE 13 at least. Otherwise, I could probably buy a droplet on Digital Ocean and host it there for now.

Deep Links


Deep Links

As well as a sort-of look for article/tutorial indexes

Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy

I tried to find a good funny reference to Jack Handey here but failed. Which might be a good thing given how the reference likely shows my age…

I have been working on various bits of the site as well as finishing up a long-overdue article. I’ve also been giving some thoughts in general about interesting ways to move forward with some ideas which I will bore you all with shortly.

Deep Linking

A while back I had some thoughts around how best to format long form articles. I finally decided to keep articles entirely on a single page as opposed to breaking them up across multiple pages. Mostly this was because I know I personally hate having to click through too many times just to read an article, and the technique is often used as a cheap means to show more ads to readers.

The problem with single page articles is linking/referencing content at an arbitrary location in the page. The markdown processor I’m using in metalsmith does add a unique heading id to each html heading element, but doesn’t expose the link easily.

So I spent some time recently writing a small metalsmith plugin to do that for me. In the articles you can now get a direct link to a heading section by hovering the mouse pointer over a heading. The link will become visible at the end of the heading (as a link icon):

PIXLS.US deep link example
The link becomes visible when hovering over a heading.

This lets you now link directly to that section. So I can now link directly to content deep into the page itself, like this link to the Nikki example for skin retouching.

These are the same heading links that are used for the Contents navigation pane on the menu:

PIXLS.US Navigation Menu

This method of exposing a heading link is similar to what you may find on GitHub for instance. So, at least there’s now the ability to deep-link into articles as needed! :)

Skin Retouching with Wavelets

Also, I took a break from this other thing I’m working on to finish writing the Skin Retouching with Wavelet Decompose article.

Nikki by Pat David
Nikki is a sample image from the Skin Retouching with Wavelets article.

This poor article has been in the queue for what feels like forever, so it’s nice to finally be able to publish it. This particular article is a combination of many of the previous things I had written around using wavelet scales for retouching work. If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to hear what anyone has to say about it!

Articles Index Page

I’m still experimenting with the look and feel of the articles index page. If you follow that link you’ll see one of the ideas I currently have for laying it out. I’m not 100% sold on this layout yet, as it may get cumbersome with many articles at once.

I may also provide links at the top of the page for particular content (tutorials, showcases, by tag/software, etc…).

Speaking of which, I’m wondering from a content management standpoint if it makes more sense to publish every item on the site as an “article”, then to handle the categorization and display as a function of tags/categories on the posts. Not quite sure just yet. I’ll still need to fiddle with some other layout/organizational ideas.

On Another Note

I finally also fixed the path problem when generating the blog post listing page. I had a problem where locally referenced images for a post (relative to the post directory) didn’t have their paths updated when showing them on the blog index page. So I took some time and repaired it with a small handlebars helper function.

For instance, the Deep Thoughts image at the beginning of this post wasn’t showing correctly from the blog index page before I fixed it.

Henri - "Bacon"

💾

Henri is encouraged that this glorious meat will finally be available to cats.

For free coupons and a chance to win a year's supply of bacon, visit www.friskies.com/bacon

Some Updates


Some Updates

Yes still writing and working!

I hate when things take me away for a little while, but won’t make any apologies just yet for having little activity here! It’s mostly a one-man show here at the moment so I do beg for some patience as I build things out and get articles together.

Speaking of building things out…

Site Structure

I have been giving some thought to the general site structure lately. I thought it might be fun to talk about it briefly.

My original (and still current) intention for the main piece of content for PIXLS.US is a tutorial. It’s the main type of content I was writing on my blog as well as what I’ve been trying to update on http://www.gimp.org/tutorials. It’s a nice, known quantity…

So I spent my early time building the site focusing on the layout and design of tutorial pages. Fonts, sizes, weights, layout, and more. It’s just the way I think. Plus, if I did a decent job on this layout, I could not worry about fiddling with it later and instead focus on writing.

I finally ended up with a layout that I liked (basically what you’re reading on right now). The problem was, I wanted a bunch of tutorials, not just one!

So with a little work and the help of some contributors (yay Ian Hex!), I was looking at a few different tutorials now for the site. Yay!

The problem now was that I needed to create a nice page to help guide users to the various tutorials. This is still not done…

So here I am at the moment still working on how best to showcase the neat tutorials on an index page of some sort:

I need to find an attractive and usable means of listing the various tutorial articles. So this is one of the things that has been taking up some of my time.

The main page has also been occupying some of my attention, as I’m not 100% sure how to present all the site information (tutorials, blog posts, showcases, etc…). There’s kind of a running theme here I guess.

I’m also going to be trying to produce some “Showcase” type of article posts that will highlight a F/OSS photographer or images.

The blog pages I’ve already finished (it’s what you’re reading now). I’ve also mostly gotten the index pages for the blog in a workable state. I took some time recently to paginate the blog index pages as well so as to not try to load the entire post history on a single page.

To summarize, there are a few things yet to design and code. I’m working on getting them so we can have an actual launch.

  • Main Page

    I still need to design and layout how best to show off the site content.

  • Tutorial/Articles Page

    This is another page to design and layout. I have some ideas and neat content already written, so this is just designing the page.

  • Showcase Pages & Index

    These pages will be functionally the same as the article pages, but the content will focus more on showcasing FL/OSS artists and their works. I’ll categorize these pages differently so I can collect them on their own index page separate from the tutorials.

In Closing…

So, things are moving along (albeit slower than I would like). I’m building the scaffolding for the future, so I don’t feel so rushed. Better to do it well than quick in my opinion.

Contributing

Also, if anyone would like to immortalize themselves on the early pages of an experimental website to bring high quality tutorials and discussions to the the Free/Open Source Imaging world – well then you know where to turn: pat@patdavid.net.

I promise I don’t bite (hard).

Robert Herrick and John Evelyn

Michael Caines reads a selection of verses by the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick, as well as a remarkable and little-known elegy by the diarist John Evelyn.Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

💾

Another Article Done


Another Article Done

Ian Hex and Luminosity Masks in darktable

2015 seems to be getting started nicely!

Just before the holidays Ian Hex sent me his finished tutorial to post, and I just finished editing it. It’s a wonderful look at using Luminosity Masks in darktable for targeted adjustments. (Parametric masks in darktable-speak). You can find the new tutorial here:

PIXLS.US: Luminosity Masks in darktable

On a side note, I had previously written about doing Luminosity Masks in GIMP on my personal blog, and yes I will be porting that tutorial here a little later!

Still Writing

I am still working on the Wavelet article (I took a break to copyedit Ian’s article). I am continuing my work on that article as well as taking a rudimentary first stab at an article index page (or possibly a variation for a main landing page for the site).

Just need to decide on an attractive and functional layout for presenting the list of articles we have available. I’m also open to suggestions if any of you readers out there have seen something that you think would be appropriate or neat to consider…

I am also open to taking submissions from folks who may have the mental fortitude to write something for the site. Just shoot me any ideas/sketches/outlines you think may be appropriate! (pat@patdavid.net in case you didn’t already have it…)

Luminosity Masking in darktable


Luminosity Masking in darktable

Making targeted adjustments to your RAWs

Luminosity Masking, the ability to create selections of your image based on its specific tones for ultra-targeted editing, is a relatively recent concept favoured by landscape photographers the world over. In this article, we will explore how to create and use Luminosity Masks in the F/OSS RAW editor darktable, so that you can make adjustments on your RAW files to isolated tones.

What is Luminosity Masking?

Luminosity Masking is a technique developed in the last 10 years or so primarily by American Southwest landscape photographer Tony Kuyper over at goodlight.us. Tony provides extensive writing and information on Luminosity Masking and how to create Luminosity Masks; in this article I’ll be primarily focusing and creating and using the masks in darktable, but if you want to really understand the basics I highly recommend giving Tony’s guide a good read over first.

In essence, Luminosity Masking is about creating highly specific selections of your photo based on the tones of the image itself. This enables you to have extremely fine control over what parts of the photo are selected to make adjustments on (such as contrast, saturation etc.) whilst keeping other tones of the photo completely unaffected. Let’s quickly illustrate this with some screenshots.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Here’s a shot I got of the Coral Beach on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, when my partner and I toured there recently in October 2014. It’s a pretty solid exposure. Let’s have a look at the histogram.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

This article assumes you already have a basic understanding of histograms and how they work but I’ll give a quick summary here: the histogram represents the tonal information of your photo. It’s a graph of the light. On the left-hand side of the histogram is where all the Shadow information is, all the darker tones of the image. On the right-hand side you’ll find all the Highlight information, the brighter tones. And therefore, towards the middle of the histogram, is where all your midtones are located. The taller the graph is in a certain section of your histogram, the more information there is. So for this photo, you can see that we have a lot of shadow and highlight information, but hardly any midtones. We’re also not clipping (losing information) any shadows and highlights as well i.e. the graph isn’t flattened against either side of the histogram. So we’ve got plenty of room to work with here.

So let’s say that I feel the sky is a little too bright and I want to darken it. The day was quite overcast at this point and the sky in this image feels too washed out. Let’s darken it by dropping the exposure.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Now we’re starting to see some more definition in the sky but the image overall feels too dingy and dark. Let’s look at the histogram.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

As you can see, underneath the histogram I have the Exposure module open and I’ve pulled the exposure of the photo down by -1.02EV, darkening the image. This is reflected in the histogram. What was previously highlight information has been brought down so that it now resides in the midtones of the photo. This has brought back some definition and colour to the sky but now the rest of the photo is too dark; you can see on the histogram that the shadow information is bundling up on the left-hand side and we’re in danger of clipping the shadows, that is, losing information, which would result in blotches of pure black in the photo. Not good.

How do we get around this? Well, we create and use a Luminosity Mask that selects just the highlights in the photo, mostly the sky, but leaves the rest of the photo alone, keeping the shadows where they are. Here’s the result of using a Luminosity Mask to darken just the highlights in the photo.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Much better. We’ve darkened the highlights, the sky, bringing back some colour and definition but have left the shadows, the beach and grass, well alone. Let’s see how our histogram is doing.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Once again, I’ve opened up the Exposure module and dropped the exposure of the photo down to -1.02EV but you can see that the module looks a little different this time. That’s because I’ve applied a Luminosity Mask to the Exposure change. We’ll come back to that in a bit. Look at the histogram in the top-right. We’ve brought the highlights down into the midtones but kept the shadows where they are. We can make another targeted adjustment if we want. Let’s say that I want to brighten the shadows a little bit as well.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Ah-ha! Now we’re bringing back some clarity and interest to the foreground, that lovely sweeping curve of the grass, beach and loch, with the hill in the distance. Check out the histogram.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

You can see at the bottom-right that I’ve made a new adjustment, known as “Exposure 1”, where I’ve increased the exposure of the image by 0.72EV. But again, I’ve applied a Luminosity Mask to this adjustment so that the brightening effect only happens to the shadows in the photo, leaving the highlights alone. In the histogram, you’ll note that we now have a lot of midtone information, by darkening the highlights and brightening the shadows. Tony Kuyper talks alot about the “Magic Midtones” and for good reason: the midtones are the real meat of the photo and applying targeted adjustments to the midtones of a photo can really take your work to the next level.

So, let’s review the changes we’ve made to this photo.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial
Fig. 1: Original RAW
Fig. 2: Whole photo darkened
Fig. 3: Highlights darkened only
Fig. 4: Shadows brightened as well

And let’s also look at how the histogram has changed.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial
Fig. 5: Original RAW
Fig. 6: Whole photo darkened
Fig. 7: Highlights darkened only
Fig. 8: Shadows brightened as well

Creating Luminosity Masks in darktable

Luminosity Masking is easy to do in darktable; it’s built right in to the software since v1.4 (and now we’re on v1.6). Every single module in darktable, whether that’s Contrast, Vibrance, Exposure etc., can have a Luminosity Mask applied to it for targeted adjustments. Let’s demonstrate on a new image.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Here’s a shot I grabbed on that same tour of Scotland in October 2014, this time of the Glenfinnan Monument. Pretty neat? If you look at the histogram at the top-right, you’ll see that I have a lot of shadow information (in fact it’s almost clipping) and I have a good range of highlight information that moves into the midtones as well. Thankfully there’s no clipping going on but the photo is too dark, with the monument and mountains appearing almost as shadowy silhouettes against the sky. What we want to do is to brighten up those shadows to bring back the details and colour in the monument and the mountains. We may also do a smidgen of highlight darkening as well.

So, let’s open the Exposure module and I’ll walk us through it.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

You can find the Exposure module in the Basic Group, represented by the hollow white circle icon.

The magic we’re looking for is under the “blend” dropdown:

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Simply select “parametric mask”. This is where the magic is. In my view, it should be renamed to Luminosity Mask, but that’s just me.

This is where we can create a mask of the photo by selecting just certain tonal ranges. Now, we’re not going to go into detail on every aspect of this masking system; I’ll leave to you to experiment with. Just note that this “parametric mask” function is available in every darktable module, so you can apply Luminosity Masks on Exposure, Saturation, Contrast, Vibrance, Local Contrast… whatever you wish. This is neat and very powerful.

So, next step: select the “L” tab for “Luminosity” – located on the far right of the other tabs “g”, “R”, “G”, “B”, “H”, “S” — and then select the little icon that has the black circle in the white square, this will show the mask.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

This is what your photo will now look like.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Don’t panic!

All this yellow is telling you is that, currently, any Exposure adjustment you make will take effect on the whole photo. Clearly, this isn’t what we want. What we’re going to do is adjust the Input slider to start narrowing down our selection to just the tones we want; in this case, we’re after the shadows so we can brighten them up whilst leaving the highlights alone. We can do this by bringing the sliders on the right-hand side of the Input slider down towards the left. This will start deselecting the highlights of the photo as we narrow our mask further towards the shadows.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

As you can see, I’ve brought the Input sliders from the right-hand side down to 25, very close to the left-hand sliders. This is reflected in the mask, as we’re now starting to deselect some of the brighter highlights in the sky. But we want to narrow it down further so that we’re targeting just the darkest parts of the photo: the mountains, foreground and monument.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Boom! We’ve had to bring the sliders down all the way to 5 to cut off the highlights in the sky. We’ve also managed to deselect some of the brighter highlights in the foreground as well. Let’s just make one final adjustment to the sliders before we start brightening the Exposure.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Here, all we’ve done is move the bottom right-hand slider back up towards the highlights a little bit. What this does is feather and soften the mask so that when we do our Exposure brightening it will look more natural and blend better.

OK, we’ve got our initial mask targeted nicely towards the shadows; hide the mask by selecting that black circle in the white square icon again. Now it’s time to start brightening up the Exposure.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Boom! Much better. Let’s do a side-by-side comparison.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial
Fig. 9: Original RAW unedited
Fig. 10: Foreground, monument and mountains (shadow areas) have been brightened through a Luminosity Mask, leaving the highlights in the sky alone.

Already, we’ve made a striking change to how the photo looks. There’s now a lot more interest as our subject, the monument, is much brighter with plenty of details available. However, we’re not quite done. The sky to the right of the monument looks a bit… funky. That’s because when we feathered our Luminosity Mask a bit we selected too much highlight information. This has resulted in part of the sky getting brighter but the rest of the sky staying the same, which looks strange. We can correct this by moving the bottom right-hand slide back to the left a bit, cutting off those highlights in the sky more.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Better. By moving the bottom right-hand slider back down from 20 to 8 the sky looks more natural.

Already, this photo is looking a lot better. Let’s take some of those bright highlights in the sky and darken them a bit, so that the eye isn’t distracted and focuses more on the monument. To do this, we’re going to make another Exposure adjustment.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

To the left of the Exposure module name you’ll see four little icons. Click the rightmost one and then select “New Instance” in the dropdown that appears.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

We now have a new module called “Exposure 1” that sits on top of our previous Exposure module. With this Exposure 1, we’re going to create a Luminosity Mask targeting the highlights so that we can darken the exposure in them.

Same process as before: in “Exposure 1” select the “blend” dropdown then select “parametric mask”.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Select the “L” tab for Luminosity then make the mask visible by clicking on the black circle in the white square icon.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

This time, we’re going to take the left-hand sliders and bring them to the right, slowly deselecting the shadows until we’ve targeted the highlight tones we want to darken.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

In our example, we’ve taken the left-hand sliders of Input up to 17 and then brought the bottom left-hand Input slider back down a little to 6 so that we feather the mask out for a more seamless blend.

Let’s start decreasing the exposure to see what it looks like. Just click on the black circle in the white square icon again to hide the mask and starting decreasing the exposure slider.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Nice! Here, we’ve brought the exposure down by -0.50EV through our Luminosity Mask, targeting the highlights and darkening them. We’ve also tweaked the bottom left-hand slider by bringing it down to 3 for a bit more feathering.

Here’s a before and after.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial
Fig 11: Shadows brightened only via a Luminosity Mask
Fig 12: Brightest highlights darkened through a Luminosity Mask in a new exposure adjustment.

Giggedy. So this photo is starting to look pretty sweet. Let’s just make one more adjustment, globally this time with no Luminosity Mask. I want to generally increase the overall exposure of the photo.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Good! As you can see, on the right-hand side I’ve created another Exposure module, now called “exposure 2” and have increased the overall exposure of the photo by 0.50EV.

To round up this tutorial, let’s look into making one more adjustment through Luminosity Masks. Now that we’ve brightened up the shadows and darkened down the highlights, we’ve moved a lot of the tones in the photo towards the midtones. This is where the real meat of the image is. We can now really give this photo some punch and pop by applying some contrast to just the midtones of the image. Here’s how.

Open the Contrast, Brightness & Saturation module, select “blend” then select the “parametric mask” option in the dropdown.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

You’ll note this time round that the tabs in the module—the “L”, “a”, “b”, “C” and “h”—are different to the Exposure module. Don’t worry. Just leave the “L” for Luminosity selected. We’re now going to adjust the Input sliders so that we’re targeting just the midtones of the photo. We do this by deselecting both the highlights and shadows. This is done by moving the left-hand sliders up and the right-hand sliders down towards the middle.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

So here’s how my midtones Luminosity Mask looks. On the right, you can see that I’ve brought the sliders towards the middle and then dropped the bottom slider of the pair away so that there’s some feathering. This is quite a tight midtones mask but that’s OK. Now let’s hide the mask and start increasing the contrast.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial

Much better. Because we’re only targeting a tight selection of the midtones we can make quite an aggressive contrast adjustment (I’ve brought the contrast slider way up to 50). I’ve also increased the brightness of the midtones a little, pulled down the saturation to compensate for the contrast adjustment, and also increased the blurring of the mask to 100, feathering out the mask further for a more natural adjustment.

Let’s look at the before and after.

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial
Fig. 13: Our RAW with the shadows brightened and the highlights darkened
Fig. 14: Contrast increased in the midtones through a Luminosity Mask

You can see the biggest difference this contrast adjustment made was to the texture in the foreground grass and the stone detail in the monument. You can make out the individual clumps of growth in the foreground as well as the individual tones in the stone of the monument. Neat.

Finally, here’s an overview of the adjustments we’ve made to this photo

Ian Hex darktable luminosity mask tutorial
Fig. 15: Original unedited RAW
Fig. 16: Shadows brightened through a Luminosity Mask
Fig. 17: Highlights darkened through a Luminosity Mask
Fig. 18: Overall exposure increased a little, no mask
Fig. 19: Contrast in the midtones increased through a Luminosity Mask.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, I’ve only gone through the very basics of what is possible with darktable’s Luminosity Masks, so that one can make subtle adjustments to the shadows, highlights and midtones of their photo in order to balance the image better. But Luminosity Masks can be used for so much more and so I invite you to experiment! Try out the different modules available in darktable and see how you can apply various filters through different masks to achieve highly-specific adjustments to your RAWs like never before.

Henri 10 - "Reigning Cat, and Dog"

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Co-starring "Olive" as "the dog".

Music for this video is "Gone Dog", by Will Braden (the thieving filmmaker).

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Ariel poems

Alan Jenkins reads a selection of Ariel poems by, among others, Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare and T. S. Eliot, from Faber's Christmas pamphlet seriesFind out more: www.the-tls.co.uk

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Still Writing


Still Writing

Yes, things are still moving (slowly) along

It’s been a busy month (+ ½) for me personally. Things have finally settled down so I can get back to writing articles and working on the site.

Wavelets Coming

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m currently working through a re-write of the various tutorials I had done about using Wavelet Decompose for skin retouching. I’m about 2⁄3 of the way through it now and expect to have it finished shortly.

Guest Writer Ian Hex

I also previously mentioned that I’ve been reaching out to a few folks to see if they might be interested in writing some articles for the site. I’m extremely pleased to say that Ian Hex is stepping up to the plate with a neat tutorial about darktable that is being written right at this very moment!

If you haven’t had a chance to see Ian’s work I highly recommend stopping by his site at http://lightsweep.co.uk/ to get a gander at some epic images from the UK. I desperately want to hop on a plane and visit after seeing them!

His self-professed mission is:

..to show off the beauty of British landscapes and architecture to the world

and I’d say he’s doing a bang-up job of it so far!

Fire of Whitby Abbey by Ian Hex (cbna)

Wonder of Variety by Ian Hex (cbna)

Ian will be writing about Luminosity Masks in darktable. Given his results and body of work I am personally looking forward to this one!

Maybe if we get a good enough response with his post we can convince him to come back and write some more…

T. E. Hulme

Welcome to TLS Voices Deputy Editor Alan Jenkins considers the work of T. E. Hulme.Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk

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Ivor Gurney

TLS VoicesMichael Caines considers the work of the war poet Ivor Gurney, and reads a selection from his work, including the previously unpublished poems "The Women at Work" and "The Vow of Life".Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk

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Gabriel-Ernest by Saki

The Times Literary Supplement - an occasional series of readings.The TLS turns to the dark side, finding stories within stories, eyes in the dark, guilty consciences and beasts in the woods – tales from M. R. James, Edith Wharton and Saki, read and introduced by Michael Caines, Mika Ross-Southall and Lucy Dallas.3 of 3Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk

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Iterating


Iterating

Minor changes and another tutorial

I’m working my way through some of the suggestions I’ve received from many folks. In particular, the “px” icon in the upper left to slide open the navigation and Table of Contents has been changed to a (hopefully) more familiar ‘hamburger’ icon. I’ll also be testing some other things in the coming weeks as time permits such as having a TOC show up by default in the right ⅓ of the page at the top.

Don’t expect it too soon as I want to focus on writing more content first. I’m aiming for a December-ish timeframe for a more official launch and want to make sure there is a decent amount of material for folks to consume.

The Next Tutorial

Speaking of material, I’m starting work on a tutorial for skin retouching with wavelet decompose. I’ve written about this many times before, but want to port the ideas over here.

Dot Eyes Closed Wavelets
“Dot Eyes Closed” wavelet decomposition

I have a few extra thoughts surrounding the use of wavelets as well as some minor changes in my workflow with them that should make a new writeup more interesting (hopefully). I’ll also focus specifically on skin retouching as opposed to some of the other things that can be done with wavelets.

More Support

I have reached out to some of my favorite amazing photographers using F/OSS in their workflows and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ll speak more about the folks in a later post, but I am personally very thankful that they have taken the time to respond and that it’s been so positive!

The Eyes by Edith Wharton

The Times Literary Supplement - an occasional series of readings.The TLS turns to the dark side, finding stories within stories, eyes in the dark, guilty consciences and beasts in the woods – tales from M. R. James, Edith Wharton and Saki, read and introduced by Michael Caines, Mika Ross-Southall and Lucy Dallas.2 of 3Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk

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There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard by M.R. James

The Times Literary Supplement - an occasional series of readings.The TLS turns to the dark side, finding stories within stories, eyes in the dark, guilty consciences and beasts in the woods – tales from M. R. James, Edith Wharton and Saki, read and introduced by Michael Caines, Mika Ross-Southall and Lucy Dallas.1 of 3Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk

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