Hello all
I was hoping to get some advice on editing these two photos I took with my OM-1 in hi-res mode. I have pretty limited experience editing in darktable (or editing digital files, at all. in fact, I pretty much suck lol) , and find myself getting burnt out during editing sessions where ill think my image looks good, ill step away, come back and think its not great.
In this case, I’m having trouble getting my edited raw images to look as good (here, in this case, I’m mostly talking sharpness) as the OOC jpeg. I guess Olympus does quite a bit of sharpening? I’m a bit more confident in my colorgrading/saturation/exposure adjustments but for these particular images I feel like I could work on them forever and never be satisfied.
Was wondering if I could get some advice on these images. I’ve included the raw files, the OOC jpegs, and my lightly edited images in this album. I was hoping to see if anyone would be willing to do a quick edit themselves to see if they are able to make a good image out of these rawfiles, but that’s quite a bit of work, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Edit: whoops, i lied. the landscape shot PA172635 is not hi-res, its regular 20MP. I’ve added two more OOC jpegs and their rawfiles (both hi res) that I selected and thought looked best out of all the photos i took today.
I can try my hand at these once I have little bit of time :) Olympus has their JPG algorithms very well tuned, they do not set the bar low! Here are some tips:
- Turn on capture sharpen (it’s under demosaicing, give them a little bit of boost)
- You might also want to turn on diffuse or sharpen module and use something like sharpen demosaicing / AA Filter preset
- For photos like these where they’ve been shot (looks like) from a distance, there’s atmospheric haze, you might want to turn on “haze removal” module and see if you like the results
- I’m using a preview version of Darktable that has AGX -module (which I use instead of filmic or sigmoid) and I like the results contrast / saturation -wise but you might need to wait for a bit until it’s in the official release, until then I recommend using sigmoid
- I have my own 3D Luts I use for colors but to get somewhat closer to Olympus colors you could use “Rgb Primaries” module and tweak every hue little bit right (somewhat more for the green one) and add some color purity for each one of them (again somewhat more to the green one)
- For the shots at ISO 800 I’d enable denoise (profiled)
- After that I usually play around with “color balance rgb” (and maybe tone equalizer) if I still need more relighting / contrast / saturation work done
Once you get a basic set of corrections you think might benefit most of the images, create a new style and try applying that to more photos and see if it works… and tweak it along. It’s less exhausting to edit when you get a basic style down that provides a better starting point. Darktable may be a bit intimidating because of the berth and depth but you’ll get there eventually and you’ll be flying through edits :) (Also, don’t forget to hotkey stuff that you notice you use a lot, like cropping etc.)
Oh, almost forgot: if you want to see cool edits using Darktable I recommend watching some videos from Boris Hajdukovic.
Hey,
The photos look great!
Personally, I try to keep my photos as they are and only edit a few. I’m always questioning my edits. For example, should it be more bluish or warmer? Should I keep what I saw, or make it better - but fake? And that’s a rabbit hole. I also try to make the whole album follow the same style, so if I edit one, I end up editing all of them. I can spend more time editing my photos than taking them.
About the shapness, I’m using rawtherapee, I found it to have a bit more logical UI. It applies capture sharpening by default to raw images, which rarely needs adjustment. Have you tried it yet?
Agreed RawTherapee is so much better UX/UI wise
Thanks! Yeah, me too Re: the endless rabbit hole of editing. For one thing, I very much hate the editing process! I too want things to look natural, but I’ve been watching the “Darktable Landscapes” Youtube channel and I’m amazed at what he’s able to do with some of his rawfiles, especially his use of masks.
Usually I just stick with the OOC jpegs because I find them good enough, but in this particular shot I’m using a long lens and teleconverter, and since the subject is so far away there’s a bit of haze and not a ton ton of detail. So i figureed it’d be a good candidate to practice editing and see if I can make a better image than the OOC jpeg… but I’ve been feeling like I just can’t! When I zoom in to bricks of the church in the OOC images, they seem a lot cleaner and sharper than my edited raw files, and I’m having trouble sharpening in darktable without making the image look twice baked.
I haven’t tried rawtherapee yet but I’ve heard its a bit less cumbersome than Darktable – I think I’ll try that and see how it does. Thanks again!
