Fundamentals of Photo Editing in Darktable

1. Darktable Introduction: dark table is a free raw image processing software similar to Adobe light room or Camera Raw, which is found in photo shop. In my opinion, Dark table isn't quite as popular as adobes raw processors for two main reasons. Number one is that Adobe offers light room and camera raw as part of their popular Creative Cloud subscription, so millions of subscribers have instant access to these programs. Number two is that light room and camera have simplified their user interfaces, using basic sliders for most of their editing features or options. This makes the programs more beginner friendly. What a lot of people may find surprising is that light room has been around since 2006 while Dark Table has been around since 2009. So Light Room is only three years older than Dark Table, and both programs are relatively new. Camera is the oldest of the programs as it was founded in 2003. In my personal experience, Dark Table is actually a better rob processing software than the Adobe options, because it allows for more in depth photo editing. And processing is more reliable in terms of performance and, of course, is totally free. If Dark Table is the first raw processing software you've ever used, you'll instantly fall in love with the program. However, if you are switching from Adobe, you'll need to get used to the complexity of dog table compared to the oversimplified adobe programs. In the end, though, you'll love how much flexibility of the program offers, as well as the numerous options for processing and editing your photos, keeping your photos organized and even extending the capabilities of your camera with features like tethering Next up, I'll show you how to take raw photos with your camera. 2. Taking RAW Photos: most DSLR cameras have the capability of taking raw photos. It is simply a matter of choosing the right setting in your camera's menu in order to ensure that the photos you're taking are in a raw format. Plus, if you aren't quite ready to step away from editing J pegs or want a J peg backup, your camera will likely have a setting that allows you to take a picture with both a raw image file and a J peg file. But first, what's a raw image? Raw images are the files created directly by your cameras image sensor. They are typically much larger than the J peg because they are un compressed or compressed very little, whereas A J peg has a lot of compression. Therefore, when taking raw photos, you will typically need to use memory cards with more space. Raw files provide more flexibility in photo editing because so much of the original camera sensor data is intact. The editing of raw files is called raw processing. You have more freedom when processing raw files because you get to make all the decisions as to how the raw images processed. On the other hand, when editing with the J. Peg file. Your camera has already made a series of processing decisions with the image data and then compressed those decisions into a JPEG file. You can make minor tweaks to a J Peg file, but more extreme edits will add significant noise or other artifacts to your image. Only raw processing software can handle raw files. For example, both Gimp and Photoshopped are unable to process raw files on their own. Gimp relies on third party raw processors such as dark table and photo shop uses came a rock, which is built in the photo shop but is actually a separate piece of software. Overall, the benefit of processing raw images over editing J peg images is that more data can be recovered from a raw image. In other words, you can do things like drastically increase the exposure or adjust the colors in a raw file without adding significant noise to the image will now demonstrate how to set your camera to take raw photos using a cane and 70 your process and available options will be different , depending on the camera make and model you're using. However, cannons are pretty common, and their menus are similar across various camera models. First, I'll hit the menu button toe access. The main menu on my camera will then need to find the quality option, which for me is under the very first tab. If I'm not on the first tab, I can navigate to it using what's called the multi controller or the little joystick to the right of the LCD screen. Once I have navigated to the quality option, I'll click OK to access its settings. In my case, I have two rows of options. Raw is the top row, and J Peg is the bottom Rome in the raw row, which I can navigate using my main dial to scroll through. I can choose the first option, which will essentially turn the raw option off the raw option, which will produce the full size raw image For this camera, which is 18 megapixels for the Canon seven D or I can choose the M ra or Esra options, which stand for medium raw or small raw. These last two options will still produce a raw image, but the final result will contain less pixels than what the camera is capable of producing these air good options. If you don't have tons of space left on your memory card in the J Peg row, which I could navigate using the quick control dial, I can either turn J peg photos off with the first option or select between large, medium or small J pegs. If I also have a raw option selected, I will get both a raw image and a J peg image each time I take a photo. Once I have selected the options I want, I can click the OK button in the middle of the quick control dial to set these options. Now, the next time I take a photo, it will produce both a raw image file in a J. Peg file. I can then import these files to my computer and can process the raw files in dark table. There are two ways to upload raw images to your computer. You can either take out the memory card and use a memory card reader to drag and drop files onto your computer. Or you can plug in directly to your camera in my case where it says a V out digital and drag and drop your files onto your computer. That way. Next up, we'll show you how to open a raw image into dark table 3. Download and Install Darktable: in this lecture will be showing you how to download and install dark table on your computer for some of you. You may be able to just skip this lecture entirely if you already have it on your computer . But dark table, of course, is totally free. You could download it at dark table dot org's. So here I am on the home page of Dark Table. All you need to do is come over here and click install, and when you scroll down on the install page, you'll see a variety of choices for your operating system. There's some funky looking ones here. That's because those air Linux operating systems here, you'll see you've got the Mac operating system. And then down here you have windows, and further down you could see an explanation of which type of operating system each one represents. So in my case, I'm using Windows, so I'll click the Windows operating system that will take me down here to the Windows section. Then I can click the download, the latest Windows installer for dark table Option, and you'll see if I hover my mouse over that in the corner. It's a dot txt file don't click on that. You can determine where you want to download this file. I always go with my downloads folder and click Save. Once you're dot txt file has finished downloading on your computer, click this arrow and click open. You'll get a security message. Here I'll click. Yes, just like any other installation. You're just going to read through the directions. Click Next agreed to the terms of license. You can choose where in your computer you want to save this so I'll just go with my C drive . Click next click next again, and he could choose whether or not you want the documentation and help files. I'll include those with the installation and click install. So this will start the extraction process, which is gonna happen with an execute herbal file. Once everything has been extracted, is going to give you this completed dark table set up page. Just click finish and I'll minimize my browser window there and here under the search bar. I'm gonna type in dark table. That should bring up the app here in your search bar, and I'll just click on that. Some of you may just have a desktop icon on your desktop. I have my icons hidden here and here is dark table coming up. Next, I'll show you how to import raw images from your computer into dark table. 4. Importing RAW Photos to Your Computer: in this lecture will be showing you how to transfer your image files from your camera onto your computer. So, as I mentioned in an earlier lecture, you can either do this using a card and a card reader. So the car that's inside your camera or you can plug into your A V out digital and plug that court into your computer using something like a USB. So I'm gonna go with the latter method because my car reader currently doesn't work. So here I have my camera. So it's the cane and 70 and I've already got this plugged into that a v out digital, this court here. Place that down, going to plug this into my USB and then make sure your camera is turned on so you may get a message a little pop up asking what to do with this. If you get that message, just click on the little pop up that will bring up the option to open a folder. Click on the open the folder option. It's not popping up here right now, but it will open up this folder right here, which is the folder for your camera, so double click on here, and it's gonna usually be in D. C. I am for cannons and then 100 e 0 70 So here are some images I just took. And if I hover over one of these images, it will be a J peg file and the other one won't give me much data right now. It will give me data once I import this into my computer. But usually you could tell which ones that raw file, because it will be the larger one. So here's the raw file on the left and the one on the right that says J pay when I hover over it is going to be my J peg image, and you can preview the J peg images. So that's why J Peg is useful. So there, you could see, is a preview of the J. Peg, and I'm gonna exit out of that. So what I can do is take control A that will select all of my images, and I can scroll to the location where I want to say this. So go to my photography folder, create a new folder here, and I'll name this March 9 Bird photography double click to enter that full there, control V and that will paste all my images into here. So now you can see as this is pasting. We have CR two files. Those were gonna be our raw files. More on that in the next lecture. And then we have the J Peg file, which is the J Peg backup we created, and you'll remember in an earlier lecture when I said it what types of photos I wanted my camera to take. I did the raw format, so that was the largest raw image file that my camera was going to take. And then I did a large J peg format. So that's what's popping up here. You've got one raw image in one large JPEG image. So now all of those files are located on my computer and I'll click off to de select them. So now when I hover over this, you'll see it's going to give me some data about the camera and all the settings, so that's one of the plus sides to using a raw image is you do get to see some of your camera data, for example, you could see my eye. So was set to 200 my F stop 5.6 and you can see in my exposure time was 1 4/100 of a second . Whereas the jam peg file is not going to give me all that information is just going to tell me the dimensions of the image, the size of it and the date it was taken the benefit of the J. Peg. The reason I like using this is before I open it into a raw processor. I can double click on it here that's going to allow me to cycle through these two, preview them, and if I use the right arrow on my keyboard, I usually hit it twice. The raw image will display, but it can take some time to load up. So I just like to go through the J Peg files. Those will load faster and give me a nice little preview of my images so I can exit out of here. I can also go to view, and I can change the preview type. That way I can get a better preview of the images I'm looking at, but that essentially, is how you upload raw images to your computer. Next up, we'll show you had open up these images into dark table 5. Open a New RAW Image: in this lecture, I'll be showing you how to open raw image files into dark table and really any image files for that matter. So, for starters, after you've downloaded dark Table, as we did in a previous lecture, you can open dark table up on your computer so you can either click on the shortcut icon on your desktop or come over here to your search bar. If you're using Windows and just typing dark table, and then I'll come up top here and just click on the dark table. App. If you're using a Mac computer, you'll probably have to navigate over to your applications folder. But one star table is open. The blank collections page looks like this. So for those of you opening dark table for the first time, it will probably look like this. You'll see. It says there are no images in this collection and then blow that. It says If you have not imported any images yet, you can do so in the import module. So that's this module over here. We can expand this if it's not expanded already. Blow that. There is some other messaging. I'm not going to go over right now, so you can either import a single image or multiple images simultaneously into dark table and to open multiple images simultaneously. I can click on this folder button here. Then I can navigate to the location on my computer where I want to import those photos so I'll scroll down here and down here at the bottom. You'll see that March 9 bird photography folder we created earlier, So just click on the folder once I don't want to enter the folder, then I'll come over here and click open. So this will open all of my image files from that file into dark table. You'll see. Here we have J Peg and CR two files, so the CR two file is going to be the raw file. Cannon is going to use CR two CR three and c R W file types, whereas other manufacturers such as Sony, where Nikon are going to use different file types for their raw photos. I recommend Googling what your camera making model is going to save its raw photos, as in your camera, and thus you know those files were gonna be uploaded to your computer so that I'll give you an idea of what raw file type is going to be imported here into dark table, and you'll see that when I hover over any set of images in this case, because those images were duplicates of each other, it's going to highlight both of those images and let you know that those are duplicates. So once I've imported the photos I want to import, I can click on one of these to make it the active file and you'll see here. It says one image of 100 is currently selected, so once I have an image selected, I can come over here to dark room. So the dark room tab is where we're going to be performing our image editing, and I'll get into scrolling through the various images that you've imported in dark table in a later lecture. But if I wanted to open up a single image into dark table, the process is slightly different. So come back over here to the light table tab and I'll come back over to import and I'll just click image this time. So now, once again, I will navigate to where my image is located that I want to open. So here is the file right here. You'll see when I click on that raw file over here is going to give me a preview of that file as well as the name of the file of Top here. So this is indeed the file I want to open up. So click open. And now you'll see that because we only opened a single image, it'll just open that automatically in dark rooms so you could start editing. This file has already been edited, and I will go over why? That is why this is showing up with, and it's already. I did edit this earlier, but if I wanted to navigate back over to light table, I could just click on the tab up top here. And here is that image that we imported and you'll see. It's already part of a collection because I've already imported some photos from the same folder, so those collections are going to be over here on the left That shows you how many images are in that particular collection and what folder that collection is from. So in this case, it's from this folder here, and there are three photos already imported. And if I come up top, you'll see. Here is that March 9 folder that we imported and the 100 images that are part of that folder. All right, so that's it for this lecture. Up next, I'll show you why there's no save button inside of dark table. 6. Why There's No Save Button in Darktable: An important thing to note about Dark table is that there is no save button there. Our export options in the light table, Ted. But you do not need to save your image because dark Table automatically saves it while you work. When you open a file into dark table and begin making edits, the program creates what's called an ex MP sidecar file. This is essentially a duplicate file of the image you are working on that contains all the data you create as you make adjustments to your raw images the next time you open that same raw image in dark table, the program will also automatically open the corresponding ex ante file with all your editing data, along with the photo. So all your edits will be automatically applied to the image even when you are editing in a new session. So in other words, when you close down dark table and reopen it, the X and P sidecar file is located in the same folder as the raw image file you are working on. For example, in this case, the file is in the same folder as my photo. So if I open up my file Explorer here. Here is my photo, and here you can see the X and P sidecar file and you could see it ends in the extension dot ex MP. So that's how you know that's the sidecar file. When importing this image into dark table from the light table tab, you will import it the way you would any other image. As I discussed in an earlier lecture, you will not see the X and P sidecar file listed when searching for the image to import. So let's minimize this here. And right now I'm in the dark room tab. So let's go over to the light table tab and over here on the left side, let me just minimize collect images so you'll see here it says import. And down here, as I mentioned in the previous lecture, all quick to import the image. And if I scroll down here, you'll see Here is the CR two file, which is the raw file. There is no ex MP sidecar file that's going to display here, but I do know because I've edited this image in the past that it will have an ex MP sidecar file as you guys saw here in the File Explorer, so I would just open this the same way I would open any other image into dark table, the difference being it's going to automatically open the sidecar file along with it. And so all my previous edits are going to be applied to this photo. If once you've edited your photo, you wanted to save your image as a different file type. You want to use the export feature in dark table. This feature is found in the light table tab, and I'll provide a quick overview of exporting your image as a J peg. So for starters, you want to go to the light table tab and make sure that whatever image you want to export is selected here, then come over to export selected. So I'll click on this to expand it, and you'll say, For starters, the first section here is storage options. The target storage is where on your computer you want to save this file. So if I click on this little folder icon here, this will bring up a dialogue to allow me to save my image to a location on my computer. So, for example, navigate over to photography. And then I'll click on the U Valley folder here, where my original image was located. Now I'll come over to the folder where I'm placing my edited images, and you can always click on this icon here to create a new folder. But this is where I want my image to be located, so I'll click the select as output destination button there. And now we have chosen where we want to save our file or where we want to export our J peg . So here you'll see an option that says, on conflict. This is allowing you to choose what happens whenever you have a duplicate file of this image. So if you already have a J peg with the same image name, this is telling dark table what you want to do with that duplicate file so you'll see the drop down option here. Right now, it's said to create a unique file name. So what this will essentially do is take that file name that already exists in Add a unique file name, identify or to the end of that. For example, if it's named Image 1234 it'll rename it image. 1234 underscore one. Then you have the override option that will just totally overwrite that existing duplicate file that already exists. So will get rid of the old file and override it with the new file. And then you have the skip option, which means it just won't save this at all. So I only recommend doing that if you're saving multiple images simultaneously in, perhaps you don't want to over a any old files at all. So in this case, I'll just go to create unique file name. That way it will add that unique file, identify at the end and still have the saved under four man options. This allows you to choose the file format. You want to save this as so here, you'll see we have J peg a Pit J Pay 2012 bit in a series of other different file types. I'll say this as a J peg a pit for now, just for the sake of time. And then when you select that option is going to give you some other options Here for the case of the J Peg, it'll just give you a quality slider so you can choose how much you want Teoh. Turn up or down. The quality on this and turning up the quality will obviously increase the quality of the image. But it will also increased the file size of the image. And if you decrease the quality too much, that will be noticeable in the image. It'll be a low quality image, although it will save room. So how much you turn this up is going to depend on how much quality you're willing to sacrifice in order to have a smaller image size. So I typically set this around 70 to 85 especially if I'm saving this for the Web. If I'm just saving this to my computer, I might go all the way up to 100. Or if I'm printing this, I might go all the way up to 100. But next under global options, you have the option to scale this image. So right now the Max file size is set to 1920. You can increase or decrease this and allow upscaling is going to allow you to scale this up, so scaling up is always going to result in quality loss because theme program has to fill in pixels that don't exist. So this is telling the program. If I'm setting a file size that's larger than the max, this will not save it if I do not allow upscaling and high quality. Re sampling also has to do with the upscaling. So re sampling is whenever those pixels air being invented. The next option here is Thebe profile setting. So this is the color profile. You're exporting this, too. I recommend just keeping this set to image settings. Unless you have a particular color profile, you want export. This too intense has to do with the way the colors are going to be displayed. So perceptual is going to be the most common option if you're not going to go with the image settings. And perceptual is basically how our I see the photo. So the way our eyes determined color. This is going to try to match that. And this happens in the history. Graeme. There's some other options here, which I'm not going to get into right now, and then Style allows you to choose a pre save style you've created, so I'll get into that in later lectures. But Right now, the only style I have is the test style. That's basically a series of edits or modules. You want to add to your image so you can do that automatically here in the export option. So when you're ready to export this, you could just click the export button. And here you'll see this is the location where our file has been exported, and you can also see the name there at the end. I'll show you how to remove previous edits you've made to your photo in future lectures, but next up I'll introduce you to the many panels found in dark table, starting with the navigation panel. 7. Navigation Panel: the different feature areas in dark table are called the panels. And the first panel I'm going to cover is the navigation panel. So right now I am in the light table, Tab will navigate back over to the dark room tab. Here is our edited image and on the left side, here in the top left. This is the navigation panel. So this is going to show you how zoomed in or out you are on your image right now. This is fit to screen. So you could see this little icon here. That's the fit to screen icon. I can click on this down arrow here, and this gives me some other options. So if I click on the small option that will zoom out and right here, you could see how much that zoomed out. Exactly. So right now it's zoomed out at 10%. That means this is 10% of the full size of the image. On the other hand, I can zoom in, so let's go with 100%. This is the full size of the image, and I can click and drag to move on my image. So move to the part that I'm zoomed in on and you could see that when I do that over here, the preview is going to be darkened around the area that I'm not zoomed in, and it's gonna be lightened on the area that I am zoomed in. So this light rectangle here is going to be framing the exact area where I'm zoomed and I can zoom all the way into 1600% so you could see that's way zoomed in. And all we get is a bunch of pixels. Or I can, of course, zoom back out to fit to screen, and that's going to fit the image to our dark table preview. Here, I can also hover my mouse over the image and use my mouse wheel. And if I scroll inwards towards my computer, that'll zoom in up to 100%. And if I scroll outwards, that will zoom out until it fits to my screen and you can see as I do that that's changing the size of the rectangle there and the location. So wherever my mouse is pointed as I scrolled, that's where I'm zooming in. And of course, as I drag, you'll see the rectangle will drag with it, and that's just showing me exactly where I'm zoomed in. And it may take a second for the full preview to generate there. So it's pretty pixelated at first, and it will show a message there saying that the program is working. And once that message goes away, that means the preview has been rendered. So I'll zoom all the way out until we get that fit to screen icon there. So that's it for the navigation panel. Pretty simple. Next up, I'll show you guys thes snapshots panel. 8. Snapshot Panel: underneath the navigation panel. In the top left is something called the snapshots panel. So this panel is pretty interesting in that it allows you to take a snapshot of your photo in its current state as you're making edits to the photo. So the benefit of this is you can then compare that snapshot to future edits as you're making them to your photo, so it provides a pretty cool comparison tool. So over here, under snapshots, you can just click this title to drop down these snapshots panel. So here in the panel right now, I don't have any snapshots. But if I click, take Snapshot. That's going to take a snapshot here in the current stage of my photo editing workflow, and then it shows a number here. That number is going to display how many items are in your current history stack at the time of the snapshot. I will get into the history stack here soon, but let's say I take a snapshot and I know I haven't gone over the modules yet, but let's just make a random correction here, So color correction. Now I want to compare the new edits I've made to this photo to my previous edits. Well, I can come over here to my snapshot, and when I click on it, it's going to create what's called a split line. And on the left side of the split line is that snapshot photo on the right side is the current version of my photo, and you'll see there is a circular arrow here in the middle of the split line. So if I click on that, that's going to change this from a vertical preview to a horizontal preview. So again, the current version is on the top and the previous versions on the bottom. I can actually move this split line. So Aiken change how much of my previews being shown for either my current version or the snapshot version there, and I'll just release that and I can continue clicking this, which is going to continue rotating that split line. Now you'll see this change. This flipped which side the snapshot is on, which is the right side now. And which side? The final ism, which is the left side. And so I can just continue rotating that until I get back to the original here and of course I can move this to the left or right. If I wanted to turn off the snapshot, I can just click on that snapshot once again, and that will turn off the snapshot and I can get back to my editing. And if I wanted to remove the snapshot that I took over here in the snapshots panel, I can click on this reset parameters button here and that will delete that snapshot. That's it for the snapshot panel. Next up, I'll go over the history panel. 9. History Panel (Darkroom Tab): the history panel located under these snapshots panel in the Dark Room tab shows a history stack, which lists every state change or, in other words, every image adjustment made through any of the modules in the order they were applied to your image. This panel goes hand in hand with adjusting your image, using the modules each time you activate in the Justin module, it shows up in the history stack and more on modules in the next lecture. Dark Table is officially known as a raw processing software. This means it takes the data that's in your raw file that your camera produces and turns it into the image displayed on your screen. Without raw processing software, your computer wouldn't know how to take the raw data provided by your camera and turn it into an image on your computer monitor. You also wouldn't be able to edit that image so quick. Now here is the photo will be working with for this lecture. This is the raw, unedited version of the photo I've been working with for the past couple lectures, so I haven't applied any edits to this image. Your camera will have already processed the raw image to some degree and save the processing it has done in the images metadata. So upon first opening of the History stack, which I can do over here by clicking on the title of the panel. And this is just below the snapshots panel, which I'll go ahead and collapse there. You'll notice there are already some adjustments displayed here, even if you haven't made any edits to your photo. So Dark Table has read the image data from your camera and applied the processing your camera performed automatically to the image. So, in my case, the 1st 0 through nine. So I guess the 1st 10 items in my history stack are going to be items that were automatically added for my camera and depending on what camera you guys air using your items in your history stack will probably be different than what mine looked like here. But you'll notice that some of these have a power button next to them so some of these can be turned on or off. But the ones you'll see here that do not have a power button cannot be turned out, so these will always be on your image. here and you'll see down here. White balance and highlight reconstruction can also be turned on or off, and he can't turn them on her off right here in the history stack. But you can come over here to the module section, find that particular module and turn it on or off. And, of course, I will be going over the modules in the next lecture. So don't worry, we'll get there. But I do want to demonstrate how the history stack works, and I can do that by adding a quick adjustment to my image. In this case, I'm going to add a levels adjustment so I can come over here to my tone group tab. You'll see. This is the fourth tab from the left, and if I come down here, you'll see here we have levels, and I can start by turning the levels on. And once I turned the levels on, you'll see that a new entry will show up here in my history stack for the levels. So simply turning on a module will add a new entry to the history stack. And then if I expand the levels here and I make some quick adjustments. I'm just going toe quickly. Brighton this image up and add some contrast. We'll get into the Levels tool in another lecture. But let's just say I make some quick edits with levels tool. You'll see those edits will show up as another history stack entry. So now we have two different entries for that levels adjustment that we did. So as I continue making edits to my image, turning on modules and making adjustments, the history stack can start to become quite crowded and especially full of redundant entries. So what I can do to compress the entries into something a little more manageable is come down here and click compress history stack. So when I click that is going to essentially emerge redundant entries in here. So, for example, in this case, it took the two entries from turning the levels on and then making a levels adjustment and compress it into a single entry. So that's just going to help you clean up your history stack. So the top most items in your history stack, of course, are the most recent items that you've added here. So in other words, they're the most recent adjustments you've made to your image, whereas the bottom most entries in the history stack are going to be ones that you made previously. So it goes from the bottom to the top in terms of most recent and a quick note. If you were to come down to an earlier entry, So let's say you came down here to number five. That's going to undo all of the entries that you did after that. So this is now going to be the current state. And then, if you were to come back over here and turn on the levels and start making adjustments, essentially, what's gonna happen is it's going to erase all those other items in your history stack and start from this new spot here in your history. Stack. So now you'll CR edit looks different because it's editing from a different place in our history Stack. It undid all those other actions there. So you do want to be careful when you're using this feature. You don't want to go back to preview what your image looked like at that point in time in the history stack. You can actually do that with the Snapshots panel instead to play it safe, but you don't want to accidentally undo a bunch of your editing work, which is pretty common. In fact, the dark table team mentions it in their documentation. So in this case, I just hate control Z to back up until I got to that part where we added the levels Originally, if I make a bunch of edits to an image, I can save all those, and it's in the history of Stack as a style. This allows me to then quickly apply the end. It's in my history. Stack to another image. So in this case, we don't have a ton of items in here in the history stack because I've only made a single edit. But hypothetically, let's say I had, like, 30 edits in here, and then I wanted to apply all these edits to another image in the future. What I can do is come over here and click this button here, which is the create a style from the current history stack button. So when I click on that, that's gonna pop up with the create new style dialogue here, and with this I can add a title in description for my style. So in this case, maybe I'll just put basic at it. And for the description. This contains levels adjustment and other basic edits. And then under here we have a list of all the various edits or all the various modules that we can add as part of our style. So you could see that we have the name of the module here, the name of the action. So in this case, it's levels module, and then whether or not that module is turned on in this case. So all of our modules that are listed here in the history stack are turned on, which means each one of these is goingto say on next to it. But if any of these were turned off, it would say off. But now I can either just add one of the adjustments in here, or I can at all of them so I can check off all the ones I want to add and just go down the line here. And then I can click the save button and that'll save that style, and I can add that style to a future image 10. History Panel (Lighttable Tab): I can perform a few different tasks with the history stack over in the light table tab as well as had previously created styles to my photo. So right now we're in the dark room tab I can navigate over here into the light table tab and on the right side here, you'll see that we also have a history of stack panel as well as the styles panel. So to start, I'm going to make sure I'm selected on this image and I'm gonna click. Discard history. That's going to clear the entire history we just did on this image, so it will revert it back to the original image more on that in a second. But if I come down here, it's his styles. You'll see. First of all, the basic at it we just created is now in here under the style section. But I also have a style that I created earlier, and that was with the original edits I did on this photo. So that is labeled D T. Original photo edits If I double click on that, that's going to apply that style to this photo here. So now we have all of our original edits on the photo. If I come back to the dark room tab, you'll see Now we have a nice edited photo. And over here in the history panel are all those edits that I made. And by the way, quick note. There is a little bar here that you can use to scroll down. So any time you need to scroll down and get to a lower portion here in the panel section, you could just use this little scroll bar, but going back over here to light table. So now I've added this style to our photo. I'm gonna come up here to the history stack. Let me just collapse this styles panel here. So the first item in the history stack under light table is going to be copy. So when I click copy, that's going to allow me to copy the entire history stack from that image, and you could see that's going to automatically check everything off. I can uncheck items that maybe I don't want Teoh copy here. So, for example, I could go to select none, and then maybe I can just copy individual and it's from here. Let's just go with a couple of these and then I'll click. OK, so that history stack has now been copied. And once I copy a history stack, you'll notice some other options. Open up here, including paste and paste. All. So what I can do is I can select another image here inside of my file manager. And I've got two different photos here that I'm not using. I could hold the shift key and click, and now I can select two images. And then when I could do is come over here under the history stack panel and click Paste. And when I just click pace, that's gonna give me the option to paste either some or all of those items in the history stack. So I'm just gonna keep this set up the way we had it and click, OK, and now you'll see that the history stack items that we checked off have now been added to these photos. So, for example, the vignette was one of the items that we checked off here, so that has been added to this photo. Now, so click off of both of these photos and come back over here. So if I click on this image to activate it again, I can click copy all. So that's not even then it pop up with an option. It's just going to automatically copy everything from the history stack. And then let's come over here to this photo. And if I hit this card history as you saw before, that's going to erase the entire history extract that's on that photo currently. So click yes, that will clear the history stack. And then, if I come over and click Paste all, it's not even that come up with the box is just gonna automatically paste all those edits onto this photos. History stay. So with this one as our active photo, if I come over to Dark Room, you'll see here under the history stack that this now contains a bunch of edits. So come back over the light table and once again, click discard history that's going to delete everything in here. Saul Click. Yes, that will revert that back to the original image clicking on this image. Once again, you'll see there is another option here, which is the compressed history option. So, as I mentioned earlier, you can use that compress history stack button when you are working with the history stack panel on an image, you can also do that from here. So if you wanted to select maybe 10 images and compress the history stack for all of those images, you can do that using this button here inside the history stack panel under the light table tab. So with this image as my active image, I'll click compress history, come back over a dark room and the history stack will now be compressed. It wasn't really un compressed before, so probably didn't do anything, if much of anything. But if this was a really clever history stack, it would compress and clean up that history stack. So one more time will come back over here to the light table tab. You'll also notice there's something here that says Mode, and the first option here is upend. So if you have the set to upend when you're performing all the options, I showed you guys up here that is going to merge the new history stack with the existing history stacks. So that's going to keep all the old items and image might have had in its history. Stack plus those new edits that you're gonna add with the history stack you're copying from another image. On the other hand, if I click over right, that's going to delete the old history stack oven image and replace it entirely with the new history stack. So, for example, this image already has a history stack. As you could tell, it's already edited slightly. So if I come over here, click copy all and then come over here. Make sure this is my activated image. Right now. The mode is set to overwrite. So if I click paste all, it's going to replace the history sect that we had on this image before with the brand new history stack. If I had Control Z, that will undo that history stack change. I just did there, so that's reverting this back to the original. So now if I come back to hear hit, copy all and change the mode to upend, come back to this image, click paste all instead of replacing the history stack. It's now going to basically compound the to history stacks onto this image, and that is the result we're going to get. So once again, I'll hit control Z to undo that, and I'll click back on the image we've been working on here. So below the mode option, you have a load sidecar file option or a right sidecar files option. So, as I mentioned in my lecture on why Dark Table doesn't have a save button each time you perform edits on an image, it's going to automatically create an X and P sidecar file next to your image. And that S and P sidecar file is going to contain all of your and it's So what this is saying is that if you haven't made any edits to an image yet, for example, this one doesn't have any edits. You can click right sidecar files, and that will just create a sidecar file for this image. That's kind of a useless feature because it's going toe automatically create that sidecar file anyway, but it's there in case you need it. On the other hand, you have an option here to load a sidecar file. This is actually a lot more useful because there are times when maybe you accidentally delete a history stack from an image of working on what you can reload that history stack by using this load sidecar file option, assuming you have a backup. So, for example, let's come over here and click Discard history and let me just confirm that I want to discard it. So let's say I did that. But now I realize that I want to bring back those edits. Of course, right now I can hate control Z, but let's say I performed a bunch of edits on this and realize I didn't like him. Well, what I can do is come over here and click load sidecar file and for this particular image actually created a duplicate. So right now I'm in another folder here, let me just navigates that folder manually. So, for example, come over here to photography and right here was the original folder where this sidecar file was located. You can actually see this is the original sidecar file for this image. But if I were to make additional edits to this image after I discarded the history, that ex MP sidecar file is going to now contain the new edits, it's gonna overwrite the old edits that I have. So this one is basically no good. So what I did earlier was I created a duplicate. So if I come over here to the photography folder again and over here to the dark table course photos and appeared to the main photo for course folder here, you could see the duplicate sidecar file I created. And now, if I click open, that will load that sidecar file to this image, and he could. CR edits have been recovered and reverted back to their original state. But now that I've demonstrated how that works, I'm going to click, discard history. So we're just going to delete the entire editing history for this, and that's going to get us ready for the next lecture. So next up, I'm going to provide an introduction to the dark Table Modules panel. 11. Modules Introduction: In this lecture, I'll be covering an introduction to the important modules concept. So over here in dark table, I'm in the light table tab. I'll switch back over here to dark room and in the dark room tab on the right side of the window, you have your modules. Thes modules allow you to make a variety of edits and adjustments to your images from color correcting to sharpening, cropping to adding even yet and so on. There are 61 total modules available in dark table, So above the modules is the history Graham. This is going to contain the Value Channel of your image as well as the color channels. This hopes you visualize the lighting and colors of the image you're editing. I'll get more into this topic a little bit later in a different lecture. An important thing to note about Dark Table is that the modules are always applied in a specific order. This order ensures that your image editing is nondestructive, meaning you can always go back and tweak modules no matter what order you activated and adjusted them. Originally, dark table calls this preset order a pixel pipe modules are added to the pixel pipe by activating them or switching them on and removed from the pixel pipe by deactivating them or switching them off. The downside to this approach is that the modules will always be applied in a cent order so you can rearrange the order. The modules are applied, but the dark table team insists they have meticulously selected the order of the pixel pipe for the best results, which essentially means they've put in the work for you. In terms of selecting the order of modules. The first modules tab here is going to be the active modules tab. So this tab displays all of the modules that are currently activated on your image. So I'm selected on this module group right now because Dark Table has taken raw data from our camera that processing from the camera is displayed over here. So some modules are already turned on and added in here, even though we haven't edited this image yet and you'll also notice that some of these modules do not contain a little power button. So this power button is how you turn on or off the modules. Some of them do not have that option which means you cannot turn them off. Or on the other hand, some of these do have the power button. So even though these were added by default from your cameras data, you can still come in here and turn them off, for example, so the base curve weaken, turn on or off. The modules are displayed here in the order of the pixel pipe. So the bottom most items here are going to be applied first to your image in the pixel pipe order, and the items on the very top will be applied last. So it's gonna go from the Rob black white point of white balance, highlight reconstruction and so on until the very last module that's applied is the output color profile. So, as I mentioned, you can activate or deactivate modules by clicking a little power button. So, for example, I'll come over here to the tone group, and if I come down here until levels right now, this is turned off. So it's not here in the active modules group. So if I come back to the tone group and turn this on now, if I come over here to the act of modules group. That levels module is now added here and it's added to the pixel pipe in the order is going to be applied to your image relative to the other modules. So levels is pretty late in the pixel pipe order. At least in this case right now, you also notice over here in the history stack that the levels entry was added here and I haven't made any actual edits to the levels tool. I just turned it on, but it's still going to be displayed both here and the active modules and over here in my history stack, remember, the history stack simply shows you the order in which you made adjustments has nothing to do with the pixel pipe order. As you continue activating modules to make adjustments to your image, they will be placed here in the order of the pixel pipe. So newly activated modules can show up anywhere on the less, depending on what modules you have activated and where they are in the pixel pipe order. The next modules group here is going to be the favorites tab and this is going to display any modules that you have favorited so you can add a module to your favorites, usually by clicking this little hamburger icon here. So this is going to show a bunch of presets as well as little Option two. Favorite this. You could see the little check box here, and right now we just have the base curve in here. But if I come back over to the active modules here, we have the Levels module. If I click on the hamburger icon, you'll see this one also has the option at a favorite, So I'll check that, and that will automatically put the Levels module here inside of my favorites tab. The remaining five tabs air all different groups based on the types of image adjustments for edits they apply to your image. I'll be going over in the modules in each of these tabs in more detail throughout the course, but from left to right, these tabs are the basic group, which contains many common modules that you'll be using during your photo editing. You're likely used modules in this group the most. Then there's the Tone group, Color group, Corrections Group and Effects Group. Again, I'll get into the module is located in these group in future lectures. At the bottom of the module section is a drop down that allows you to view all of the modules found in dark table. These modules are displayed in alphabetical order, so by default, all the modules will not be displayed inside of these groups here. Only a certain set of modules will be, but you can scroll through here and see all of the 61 modules available in dark table, and the ones that have been added to my favorites tab have a little star next to them. So clicking on the modules here you can cycle through any of three status is. So If you click on this one, it's going to favorite that, and that will add this here to your favorite section and put a little star icon there. If you click on it again, it's going to hide that module so the module will no longer display in any of these tabs, and you could see that the color of this is no longer that light gray. It's now going to be a darker gray, so that means it's hidden. And if I click on it one more time, that's going to show the module. So now this module, which is the basic adjustments module, will display inside of its corresponding tab here, its corresponding group. So right now we are inside of the basic group here, and you'll see that the background for this module is now going to be like gray again. So in the top, right of the more modules dropped down, you'll see a little hamburger icon. And if I click on this, this is going to display a series of options for displaying your modules here, known as subsets or workspaces, so you could see you have a variety of subsets here and clicking. These is basically going to determine which modules are displayed or hidden based on a variety of presets. So, for example, if I click on the all modules subset, that's going to display all of the 61 modules available inside a dark table in their respective groups here, their respective tabs. On the other hand, if I come over here and I go with something like creative modules, only that's going Teoh hide certain modules and only display creative modules. So if I scroll through here, you could see many of these now have the dark gray background, which means those are now hidden, you know, come back up here. And if I come down here, you'll see there's a variety of work spaces, so these air, based on certain types of photo editing you want to do. For example, if you have low light photography, you're working on an image that's maybe poorly lit. You can click on this low light in high I so workspace, and that's going to show all of the modules that have to do with fixing a dark image or fixing an image that has a high. So hi, I so and I'll just come up here and show you one last workspace. So you have one called portrait and beauty that's going to display all of the modules that have to do with editing a portrait image or an image that contains a person. For now, come back up here and I'm just going to reset this to the subset. All modules. That way, all of our modules are displayed here. The last modules concept I'll cover for this lecture is that most modules come with default presets. While all modules have the ability for users to create and store their own presets. So to access these presets, let's come back here to the tone group and come over here to levels. So there's a little hamburger icon here. If I cook on this, you'll see we have the option to store a new preset. So let me just expand the levels here by clicking on it. And if I make some adjustments to my levels and then let's say I want to save these adjustments as a preset, I can come up top here to the hamburger icon, quick to store this as a new preset, and this gives me the option to name my preset so basic levels. And I could describe the preset here, and I'll quick okay, and that will store this preset now. And when I click on the little hamburger icon you can see now we have the option here for the basic levels preset. So the levels tool, in particular doesn't have any preset stored here by the fault, really. But if I come back over here to the base curve module, so I just click on that two, favorite it and now we are Favorites group here So if I come over here, you'll see clicking the hamburger icon displays many presets, and these ones happen to be based on what kind of camera you're using. So this could be pretty useful if you want to set a curve using a preset based on your camera make. So I'll click the more modules panel here just to minimize that and come back over here to our active modules. Let me just collapse the levels here. So that's it for this lecture. Next up, I'll cover the bottom bar. 12. Bottom Bar & Film Strip: below the image window, which is the main area that displays your image, is the bottom panel or the bottom bar. This panel essentially provides a series of short cuts for things like presets and styles, as well as allowing you to turn on over or under exposure warnings, soft proofing and gamma. Check for your images. I'll go into detail in a moment about those items, but you will also see your settings for your camera for the photo you have active. So let's start there for this lecture. And here are those settings for your camera. For the particular photo you have active. And first off we have the shutter speed, which is 1/30 of a second for this image. Then you have the F stop, which is F by point. Oh, and then you have your focal length here for the Lenzi use of 200 millimeters in this case , and then the final piece of data here is your is so which is 400 for this image. So the first icon on the far left of the bottom bar or the bottom panel is going to be your quick access to presets, and this is only going to pertain to presets that are saved as favorites. So any of your modules that have been marked as a favorite. So right now, if I click on this, you'll see the only module I have in my favorites is the base curve. And so that is going to display all of the presets for this particular module, and in this case, the presets for the base curve module are going to be based on the camera make and model. So if I come over here to the Favorites tab, you'll see the base curve is the only module that's here inside of the favorite stab. I can, of course, come over here and click on the combo box and see the same presets. I can also store a new preset. So if I create my own custom user preset, that will then display in the combo box for the quick access to these presets under here. But what I can do is, for example, I can click on this preset for the Canon Eos five D mark, too, and that will apply the base curve at it to my image and you'll see over here in the history stack that the base curve gets added here as an entry. And as usual, I can turn this module off or on if I want to. And so that toggles that modules effects on or off the next icon here in the bottom bar is going to be the quick access to styles. So you'll remember from the History stack lecture that styles can be added by saving your history stack for a particular image that happens over here so you could see that these icons are the same. So if I click on this, you could see all of the current styles that I have saved inside of dark table right now. So right now, there's only three of these. And if I hover over this, you could see the history stack for each one of these styles. And those are gonna be the items added to our current history stack. If we click on him, not gonna click on them right now, so I'll just move over to the next icon. And this icon is going to give you the ability to preview your image of working on in a new window. So if I click on this That opens up the image we're working on with all the edits in a brand new window. This just allows you to more easily view your image without all of the menus and panels going on on the sides and the bottom. So just kind of isolates the photo, and you can also set this to a particular color profile. And I'll show you guys how to do that a little bit later on in this lecture. But exit out of this so again we have the camera settings, and then to the far right here, the very first icon is going to be the raw, overexposed warning. This will show you, if you have a clipped color channel in a clipped color channel, means that a particular color on your image has been overexposed, and therefore that data has subsequently been lost. So this is just going to indicate which pixels, if any, have been overexposed for that color channel. And if I left click on this, that will toggle this on and right now we do not have any clipped color channels, which is good, but I'll right click on here and you could see there is a little menu here, and the first menu item is going to be mode. So this is determining how clipped color channels are displayed on here. The default is going to be marked with CF a color. What that means is that if you have a blue color that's over exposed and therefore the data is lost on that blue color than a blue primary color will show up where that's happening. The same is going to apply for red or green color channel. So if a red color channel has been clipped, then that will show up as a red primary color where that color has been clipped. On the other hand, I can mark this with the solid color, so that will simply say, whatever color scheme is set here in this case, blue, a blue color will show up any time you have a clipped color channel. Of course, you can change the color here, so right outside to blue, you could do red, green, blue or black, and the third option is a false color. So the false color option is going to set whatever color channel is clipped to zero. So you're red green and blue color channels each have a value between zero and 2 55 And so if you're red channel is clipped, and usually that value for that color was supposed to be like 47 or something, and that value will then be set to zero where, as your green and blue color channel values will remain the same. Don't get too much into that concept. But I'm just going to keep this set to mark with solid color, and I'll change the color here. Let's go with a blue color. So the third menu option here is the clipping threshold, and this is determining of the black point, where the white point at which dark table determines that a color channel is clipped. So if we lower this, it basically means that darker colors in here will be considered clipped. Have to really lower this for this photo for these to start showing up. So there you could see the lower we make this theme, or of that blue color is showing up again because we have this marked with a solid color and the color scheme of sets of blue, and if we raise this, it just means the brighter pixels will not be considered clipped. So even though you might have some bright pixels in a normal situation that are considered a clipped color channel, they will not be marked as clipped on here with the clipping threshold turned way up. And if I double click on this, it will reset this toe one. I recommend keeping this at one point out, unless you have a pretty specific reason why you need to lower or raise the clipping threshold. So clicking on this once will get rid of the menu, and if I click on it again, it'll turn it off. So the next icon in the bottom bar is the over or under exposed indicator or the warning here. So clicking on this will show us any areas that are overexposed or under exposed so you could see here that under exposed right now is set to blue and over expose is said to read . If I right click on this, it will bring up a menu, and here we have three menu options so we could change the color scheme. As you could see here. Red and blue are set, as are again overexposed or under exposed, and I could change this so we'll go with purple or green if we prefer, and we go with black and white. We'll keep this sets red and blue. And again, we have threshold sliders here, so we have a lower threshold slider and an upper threshold slider. So the lower threshold slider is determining the maximum amount of brightness to be considered under exposed, whereas the upper threshold slider is determining the maximum brightness threshold that something is considered overexposed. So we can either narrow this range here or we can increase it. So here we've increased the range, so pixels that aren't that dark are now considered under exposed. Pixels that aren't that bright are now considered overexposed. On the other hand, I could crank this way down 1% and this way, up to 99% and this lessens Thea amount of over or under exposed pixels. I could double click on these sliders to reset them back to the defaults, click on that, wants to get rid of that menu there and then click on it again to turn it off. So the next item here, the next icon, is the ability to soft prove your image. Soft proofing is essentially getting a preview of what your image is going to look like with a different color profile. This is often used any time you are going to send an image to a printer. So printing color profiles are going to be different than digital. Just because of the nature of how colors are displayed in a print medium versus a digital medium. Digital mediums are going toe have obviously backlit displays, whereas printing is going to rely solely on the ink in order to display the colors. So that's why colors are going to turn out different, depending on whether you're going to be using them for print or digital. So the soft proofing here is going to allow you to preview what your image will look like under those color profile conditions right now, if I right click on here, you could see my settings. So the soft proofing profile right now is s RGB, which just means this is essentially still for a computer screen, and it's going to be Web safe. But I can click on here and scroll through some default color profiles that come with dark table. There's a variety here and click on this. To get rid of this. You can also hover your mouse on here and see where on your computer that those color profiles are located and you can see. Right now there are two different folders where I have color profiles. But you can drag and drop any color profile into there, and then that will be available here in dark table. And so the reason you'd want to do that is if you're printers, send you a specific color profile to use, and then you can base your edits off of that color profile by enabling it here. Be display Profile is going to be how dark Table is displaying your image while you're editing it on your computer and by default. This is set to system display profile, which is just your computers to fall color profile. I recommend keeping the set to your computers default color profile, but I can cook on this and you'll see there are a variety of other options, including adobes, RGB color profile. So if you're gonna be sending this to an adobe user, this might be the best options so that you can see what this will look like inside of Adobe program. So there you could see the colors have changed differently since we changed. The display changes back to system display. The preview display profile is what's gonna pop up when you click on this preview icon here , and then the hissed a gram profile is how your hissed a gram is displaying colors up top here. I'll click on this. To minimize that menu, click on it again to turn it off. The last icon on here is for gamma checks. Want to click on that? That will toggle these gamut warnings. These warnings are designed to turn on any time a color is out of gamut, so out of gamut colors occur whenever you have a color profile and you have a color inside of your image that is outside that color profile. So all it's saying when something is out of gamma is that that color is not going to properly display in whatever medium. You're trying to edit this four, and that medium is determined by the color profile that you select. So if you are printing this image, for example, and you turn on this gamut warning, and you have the color profile set to your printers. Color profile Any colors that will not print properly will display based on this warning. So right now, all these little dots here are telling me that based on the color profile I have selected, these colors are not going to properly display so I can right click on here and we can change the various color profiles that this is basing its game warnings off of. And I do want to note, by the way, that these colors will still display. So if you print them out, it's not gonna show up as like an empty space or something. It's on showbiz black or just white. It will show up close to that color that is, at a gamut. It just won't be very precise. So if you have projects that require very precise coloring, or if you just really like the way the colors are showing up, you want them to be very similar in the print medium or whatever color profile that you were using than the game. It warning is a good way to see which colors are not going to be accurately displayed Another quick note is that you cannot have the gamut check or soft proofing enabled simultaneously. So, for example, if I turn on soft proof in gamma check will turn off and if I do it the other way around, then soft proofing will turn off. So just keep that in mind. You cannot have both of these turned on at the same time. So I'll turn off the game and check warning there. The last item here is going to be the filmstrip. So this is located below that bottom panel or below the bottom bar here with all those icons. If you don't see the filmstrip here, hit control F on your keyboard that toggles this on or off. But this allows you to cycle through all your images in a particular collection so I can come over here to light table. I'm just going to change the collection on, man. Let's come over here to my bird photography folder, and I do have to select an image first, so I do need to make at least one image active. If I come over here to dark room. Now here is our selected image, and blow is our filmstrip. So this is showing all of the images in our collection, and I can use my mouse wheel to scroll through these very quickly, which comes in handy any time you have a collection full of images. And, of course, I can click on any of the images here in the filmstrip. Double clicking will select that image and display it here. So this is now my active image. I could go to the image to the left by hitting the backspace key so you can see this is allowing me to just shift to the left and make each one of these active. If I wanted to shift the other way, I can hit the space bar, so that's allowing me to shift to the right and you'll notice when I hover my image. Over this, we have a little star rating system. This allows us to just quickly determine which photos are good photos in which photos or not. So this is good for anybody who has a large collection of images and doesn't want to have to continuously go back and review which photos are the good ones. You just come in here and say this is a five star photo, so I like this photo. This one's a two star photo for whatever reason, so that's another great feature of this film strip. There's also a little X icon in the bottom left corner of the image, so clicking that will do something called Rejecting the Image. That's just telling you that this is not an image that you want to edit, so it's just an easy way of indicating this is not a good photo. So quick off of that. For now. You can also color label these images using some shortcut keys. So, for example, you could do F one through F five, and you could see as I'm doing that, that little color labels are popping up here so you could do F one through F five, and that gives you one of five colors or all of them at the same time. So let me just turn those off. Zero through five is going to give you star rating, so one is going to be a one star 234 and five are It is going to be to reject an image. You can also duplicate the image here by hitting Control D. So now you'll see we have two of these images. You can also copy and paste the history stack from one photo to another. So let me switch off this photo because there's not really history Stack here. So come back over here to light table and we'll go back to this collection. Were working on double click on our original image. So this image has a history stack. I can hit Control C to copy it and then click on this image here. That's double click on it. Control V to Paste. So now we've pasted that history stack onto here. I can hit the space bar key to go back to this image here. And finally, if you hover your mouse here on this little icon in the top, right, this is just going to quickly display what's in your history stack. So if you did not have a history stack on an image this icon will not display. But if you do have a history stack, you can hover over it, and this will show you exactly what modules you have and which ones are turned on or off. All right, so that's it for this lecture. Next up, I'll show you the duplicate manager panel 13. Duplicate Manager: in this lecture will be going over the next panel in dark table, which is the duplicate manager panel. So this panel is found over here on the left side of dark table in the dark room tab and you can see I have it expanded here, So it's just below the history stack. So cooking on this, you could see we have a section titled Existing Duplicates and we only have one duplicate in here, and this actually isn't a duplicate. This is just the original image. But what this section does is that it allows you to create a duplicate of your image with the history stack, and then you can edit from that duplicates. So it's basically like having two separate images or however many duplicates you create. So it is so much of the snapshots panel, except the snapshots panel is just allowing you to preview a snapshot with the current image that you're editing. So in this case, you can actually edit on that duplicate that you're creating. So just to demonstrate here, if I come up to the history stack, you'll see I just have a couple of edits on this photo. Nothing major and let me just collapse that coming back to the duplicate manager. If I come over here, I can click this icon, which you'll see it says, create a duplicate of the image with the same history stack. So if I click this icon, it will create a duplicate, and you'll see a little number down here. That's actually the number of duplicates you've created. I created a bunch of duplicates before this tutorial before this lecture. So that's why this is listed as seven. If I created another one, this one would be listed as eight. You can exit out of these duplicates or delete the duplicates just by clicking this little X icon, and I'll click Yes, to confirm that. So I'll click on the steeple kid here, and you'll see that my duplicate also shows up in my filmstrip down here in the bottom bar . So does create two separate raw files here when I create that duplicate, so we have our original, and then we have the duplicate. But now I can either come back to my original image that I was working on or Aiken double click on my duplicate file, and I can work on this duplicate now as a separate image. So again, I know I haven't gone over the modules yet, but let's for example, turn on vibrance and click on that, and we'll just crank the vibrance up here and also turn on color correction, and I'll just crank this up. So now we've edited this duplicate image as essentially a separate image, and I can double click and come back over here to the original image, and I can continue working on that. So this is actually a good way to sort of fork off your image editing. You can continue working on the original image you were working on just the same as you were. And then you could test out other modules by forking off on the duplicate and just making whatever edits you want to make to that duplicate. And then, if you decide you don't want to keep one of these, you can always just come over here and exit out of it. It will ask you if you want to trash it, I'll click Yes, and that will delete the duplicate. And now we're left with just the original image so you can create a duplicate of your image using the existing history stack. Or you can duplicate your image using the Virgin duplicate option. So if I come over here, you'll see there is another icon, and when I hover over it, it says, create a virgin duplicate of the image without any development. So when I click on that, that is going to create a duplicate of my image. But it's going to remove all the items from the history stack. So this is essentially the original photo. Before we added any corrections to this, and so we could basically start from scratch here and begin our editing process over. And then we can compare that to the original image here that we had going before we created the duplicate. And, of course, as you could see down here in the filmstrip out duplicate that we created is now listed below. So I'll delete this duplicate, and I'll confirm it, and that will bring us back to our image we're working on at the beginning of this lecture . All right, so that's it for this lecture coming up. Next, I'll go over the color picker panel 14. Color Picker Panel: in this lecture, I'll be going over the color picker panel, which is also known as the global color picker. So this panel is going to allow you to select colors from your image, compare those colors to other colors in your image and also perform some tasks on those colors or that color that you select. So if I come over here to the left side of the dark room tab still in the dark room tab and I just collapsed the duplicate manager panel, which I went over in the last lecture, the color picker panel here is the next panel and, yes, color picker panel. Try saying that three times fast, but you'll see here we have our first option, which is the point option. So this allows you to select a single pixel from your image, and I could do so using this eyedropper tool here. So if I click on the eyedropper tool that will show up my current point that I picked on here, which I did earlier. But if I click and drag my mouse, you'll see there's four little cubes here, or four little squares that follow your mouse pointer around and the center point of those four squares is going to be the pixel that this color picker is selecting. So if I scroll all the way and you'll see there are intersecting lines here, the centre pixel there or the place where the lines intersect is the pixel that this is selecting and you could see here in what's called the color swatch. This is displaying that color so you can pick any pixel here on your image. And you can also choose the color mode that you're in for the pixels. So right now this is showing me the RGB values for this pixel. So we have red, green and blue. So these are the various values that make up the color that is displaying right here. I can also change this value to lab. So that's gonna show me luminant A and B, so this one is not quite as common. I do recommend sticking with RGB unless you have a specific purpose. But you'll see I also have a little check box here, and when I click on this, it says, restrict hissed a gram to selection. So that is converting our history. Graham to Onley display the color values for the single pixel that we select in this case because we're in point mode. And as I dragged this around you'll see the little values in the history Graham, which are on Lee showing a red, green and blue value here. So it's very simplified, those air updating as I'm dragging this pixel around. So let's say for whatever reason, I wanted to save this pixel color here. I can come over under the live samples section and I can click this little add button. You'll see there are some options here, So here we have main men and Max, this doesn't apply to the point. This is going to be in the next option that will go over in a second. But you can also change whether this is an RGB mode or lab. But then, oh, click, add, And so that will save my pixel down here so I can come back and reference this pixel if I want Teoh. And of course you could see here It says red, green and blue values, and you have the option to get rid of this. But I can continue making edits to my photo and right now, this little pixel value will change as I make edits. So, for example, let me just click and drag this to change the color you could see. Now this has that green tint on here. But let's say I wanted to save the original pixel I was working with before I made edits. Let me hit Control Z to back up, so that will revert this back to the original. If I click on this little color swatch, you'll see a little lock icon. So that means that as I make edits to my image, that pixel will no longer change. So you could see that as I'm changing the color here using the color correction module, this color is remaining the same. However, if I unlock that and then I make edits to this again, you'll see that that pixel value will change. So let me come over here and reset the color correction parameters and you'll see that will reset this little pixel value here. There's also an option here to display sample areas on the image. So when I check that, that will just show these little boxes for the various pixels I have selected across my image. So let's say I grabbed my eye dropper tool again and I clicked on a second pixel. Let's just go with something different. And then I clicked ad with this option checked here that would also show the second pixel as I continued working. So that's just a way to see what pixels I have selected throughout my image. So of course I can delete the's at any time and let me uncheck this option. So the second option here for the color picker under this first drop down is to select an area. So we've been working with a single pixel. Now we can work with an entire area of pixels, and so to do this I can click and drag my mouse. And essentially, what that's going to do is it's going to take all of the pixels within this area, and depending on what I have selected here, it will generate a little color swatch. So right now, I had this selected to mean, So this is the mean or pretty much the average of all the pixels inside of here, and I can click on this and change it to something like men So that is going to be the darkest pixel within this area, which is probably these black pixels here. So, as you can see, this is showing up as black. And I can also change this to the max pixel value. So that in this case is going to be white. And if I change the area, these values might change. So now the brightest pixel it here is more of the light green instead of a white. So I'll come back over here, changes to mean and you could see the average of these pixels or the mean of these pixels, is closer to a green color. We have the same option here for RGB or lab, as we had for the point option. And then, of course, you can restrict the history am to the selections of the selection area is the only data showing up over here in the history. Um, so that's obviously a more simplified, hissed Agrium than the history and for the entire image. But it's a bit more complicated than the point over here. Let me uncheck that, and that will revert the history and back to the history and for the entire image. And of course, you can add this color swatch down here under live samples. So if I click add, I can add the mean of this area where I can changes to men or Max and that will update it there. I can also lock this just like I could do with the point pixel. And I can click to display these sample areas on my image. So now you'll see we have an outline here around that area we selected. So come over here and delete this and uncheck this option here. So that's it for the color picker panel coming up. Next, I'll show you the tagging panel. 15. Tagging Panel: in this lecture will be going over the tagging panel in dark table, so the tagging panel is found over here on the left side of the dark room tab. So I click on here and you'll see we have two sections here. But tagging is essentially a way to keep your images organized into add keywords to those images. So they are easy to find if you want to conduct a search or something of that nature, and it also provides a way to see what actions have been taken on your image more on that in a minute. But as I mentioned, there are two sections here, so the top section are the tags that are currently added to your image. So in this case I have three generic tags I created for this lecture. So these are all added to my image, and then the bottom section here contains all of the tags found in dark table so you could see that three of the four tags I currently have created are attached to this image. And there are two buttons here, so there's attach and detach. So let's say I wanted to get rid of one of these tags. I can click on that tag, and then I can click the detach button so that will remove that tag from my image. And it will place it back here without the check mark. So the ones that have the check mark are the tags that are currently tagged to this image. I can search for tags using this little search box. Or, if I wanted to add a tag. I just click on that tag down here and then up top. I click the attached button, and that will attach my tag to this image. So, as I alluded to Dark Table creates its own tags automatically for certain actions. So if I add a style to this image, that style will be created as a tag and tag to that image. So right now, you cannot see any of those tags. But if I come over here, there's a little icon here, and if I check that, it's going to toggle those auto generated tags from dark table so you could see this one has dark table next to it. And then the description of this tag is exported. This little line here is called a pipe, and this is how you create hierarchies with tags and dark table. I'll get into that in a moment, but let's say I come over here and add a style to this image. So right now, I don't have a history stack on here. I discarded it before this lecture. So if I come over here to the styles and I just add a style here so this was that style for all of my original edits, I did. You'll see over here in my tagging section that now dark table has recorded a tag. So it says Dark Table, which means that's a dark table automated tag. I created the style here, so I added a style to my image. That's the first hierarchy. And then the second hierarchy is the actual style that was added here. So that was the D T original photo at its style, so I can toggle that off. There are multiple ways of creating new tags here, so the first way is I can come over here to this little search box, and I can type in the name of my tags. I'll just type outdoor photo hit the enter key So when you create a new tag, it will add that new tag to your active image here. So the image that we're currently on so you'll see up top here now it says outdoor photo. There's a little check box next to it. So that has been added. Another way to add a tag to this is to click on the image and hit control T, and that will bring up a little box down here. And then I can type a tag so outdoor photos, the tag we've been using. And then I mentioned that if you use this little pipe icon here that will create a hierarchy, so outdoor photo is going to be our main category there. And then I can type something like a dog and then hit the enter key so that will create a new tag Over here. You'll see it, says outdoor phone Oh, no dog. And then that's also added to my image. And let's add another tag using the same category here. So click on the image control T, take outdoor photo, create the pipe icon and then maybe like model hit the enter key. So now we've got three outdoor photo tags. These two have hierarchies. So if I come over here and I click this little toggle icon, it says toggle list, with or without hierarchy. So if I toggle that you'll see that we'll get rid of the outdoor photo that was before these two tags here. So now just says Model and no dog. So that's just a way to clean this up. If I click on that again, that will re show those hierarchies. So some other stuff you can do with these. If I right click on here, you'll see that gives me the option to detach that tag. And if I come down to the lower level and right click on that tag, that gives me several options so I can attach it to this image again. I can delete the tag. If it has a branch, I can delete the branch, and I can create a brain new tag. So if I click on that, that gives me the create tag option. So for this one, let's just call it path. This is just a random tag name or, like rock path, something descriptive, and then I can add it to a category or a hierarchy here. Remember, we created this outdoor photo hierarchy and I'll click Save, So that will create a new tag here using the outdoor photo category there. And the rock path was thetacticsroom we actually created, and you'll see that this was not automatically added to the top level here. It was not automatically tag to this photo, so that's just a way to create a new tag without attaching it there. But if I wanted to attach this, of course, I'll just click the attached button. Now you'll see it show up in here and you'll see the little check mark. All right, click on here again so you can edit this existing tag. You can copy the tag, or you can go to the tag collection, so that will take you to all of the images that contain this tag over the light table tab. Let me just click off of that and let's actually go to the light table tab now because there is a tagging section over here. I can use a little scroll bar on the right side, so here you'll see the same set up, and this is based on the image that were clicked on. Or if you hover your mouse over another image that will show you the tags for those images in these cases, I do not have any other tags here. But there are some other options here that were not available inside of the dark room tab. So for one, you have this new button. So if I came up top here in this little text box and I typed outdoor photo, make the little pipe symbol there and let's go with tall grass, I'm just using reign of names here. So this X is a search box. So right now, there is nothing similar to this, so nothing is showing up here. But if I wanted to create this as a brain new tag, I just click this little new button and so that will create that as a new tag, an ad that tag to our selected image. And so right now you can see there are four different tags here that contain the outdoor photo main category. But it's kind of messy looking right now, So if I wanted to clean this up, I can come over here and toggle this tree view so if I click on that, that will then organize everything based on those tags. So I think because I made the pipe symbol without the space for one of these, it's adding it as a separate category. That's all right. So that's just a way to organize your tags based on categories based on hierarchy. So if I click on that, that will take me back to this list view here. And of course, we have some of the same icons here that we're in the dark room tab so we have attached detach. You can turn on or off the dark table automated tags here, so I'll turn those off. You can sort these tags, and this is going to sort the tags below here. And you could toggle this without the hierarchy there, so that gets rid of the outdoor photo, and it does it for the section below as well. And I can turn that back on, and that allows these to reappear. You can also import tags here, so if you've already created tags inside of another program such as light room, you can import those tags in bulk here. That just makes your job easier. Or if you wanted to export all these tags, you can go ahead and export these out of dark table. But as I mentioned, these photos do not contain tags, and you can see that when I hover over them versus when I hover over this one, a bunch of tags appear. If I wanted to add tags to these, I could simply click on both of these. So I'll shift click on the 2nd 1 that will select two of the images here. Then I can come over to my tags, and I can click on one of the tags and click attach that will attach this tag to both of these. And I could continue doing that for whatever tags I wanted to add to these. So these both have a rock path, so I'll touch that. They both have a model. I'll touch that, and they're both taken in tall grass. So I'll touch that thes who both have dogs so I could also create a brain new tag. So let's just say outdoor photo, a little pipe icon and then dog come over here, click the new button, and that will add the outdoor photo dog tag here to both of these images, and you can see here that when I hover over these tags, it tells me how Maney images contain this tag. So right now, there are two images with this tag to selected images, I should say. And of course, if I hold shift and select the third image and come over here, you'll see. Now it's showing me how Maney selected images contain these tags, so only two of them contain the dog tag. Only one of them contained no dog tag, and so on. A quick note is that sometimes tags are automatically added to your image. You might have settings in your camera that automatically tag your photos. Those automatically added tags will show up here in dark table. Also, if you added tags in another program, such as light room, those tags will also transfer over to dark table. So if you find yourself opening up images that maybe you haven't opened in dark table before and they already have tags on them, that could be why. All right, so that's it for this lecture coming up next, we're going to start getting into photo editing using the modules 16. Introduction to Image Editing: as I mentioned earlier in this course, the modules are your main tools for making edits and image adjustments and dart table. They follow a predetermined order known as a pixel pipe, so it doesn't matter what order you activate in adjust your modules. It essentially just boils down to personal preference when it comes to choosing the order of the modules he wanted. Activate on your image. Ultimately, the dark table program will slide those modules into the predetermined pixel pipe order to produce the best results. Additionally, you will not need to activate and adjust all 61 modules every time you edit an image. In fact, you may find 5 to 10 modules you really enjoy and stick with those four routine image editing. On the other hand, you may find yourself in situations where you need many more modules to get the result you want. There will also be opportunities for you to save time in your editing process, for example, some images will have similar lighting and coloring and thus can use thes same or similar history stacks from other images through copy and paste, as I demonstrated in a previous lecture, other images will be totally unique and will require different settings. That's part of what makes photography and photo editing enjoyable. You get to use your creativity to edit your images, however you want. Each time you edit Michael with this section of the course is to give you a solid foundation base your image editing. I will dive into the more commonly used modules and explain the general scenarios for using them. By the end, you should have a pretty solid idea of how to edit an image from start to finish using general settings in the next lecture. Also, you had to adjust your images exposure. 17. Correcting Exposure: and this lecture will be going over the exposure module. So this module is found over here inside of the basic group. So this is gonna be the third tab from the left. And as I mentioned earlier in the course, this is probably going to be your most common tab for funding or modules. So under here, you'll see we have the exposure module and I'll just click this little button here to activate this. And by the way, I do want to explain real quick if I come over to the light table tab. Before I started, I did come over here and click the discard history button here under the history stack option. And that just discarded all the edits I had made up to this point for this photo. So that kind of reset our photo there will come back over here to the dark room tab. So I've turned on the exposure. You can turn it off, turn it on again. Whatever. If I expand the history stack here, you'll see that turning on the exposure module will show this up as an entry inside the history stack. So what? This module is going to do, in essence, is it's going to fix either overexposure or under exposure. So over exposure happens. Usually when you have your whites blown out, you have your brightest pixels being super bright. And if you see here on the history Graham, this would be skewed to the right. On the other hand, under exposure is whenever you have your history, Graham skewed to the left. As you can see in this case, that just means that your image is going to be on the darker side. You're not gonna have as many bright pixels, and you're gonna have much more dark pixels. That's what's happening here and our history. Graham is going to be a good way to measure what's going on as we work with this tool. So the white portion of the history is going to be the Value Channel. That's what we're going to be looking at primarily here, And the Value Channel essentially represents the brightness for darkness, values of your image. So if I come over here to the exposure module, which again we already turned on its already activated and I just expand this, you could see the options here for this module So for one, you're going to have to modes. Here. The first mode is manual, and the second mode is automatic. A. Recommend sticking with manual when you're working with this module, because the automatic setting is going to be for niche use cases, such as when you're working with time lapse photos. But for editing general photos, I suggest going with manual, and so you have to re sliders. Here you have exposure clipping threshold, and you have black level correction. We'll start with exposure here, so by default is set to zero E V E. V just stands for exposure value, so you can either increase the exposure value or decrease the exposure value. I personally recommend sticking between minus two and two E. V. The reason for this is that if you increase or decrease your exposure value by too much, you can introduce significant noise. And that's not really something you want to do. I also recommend keeping an eye on this history. Graham as you dragged the exposure slider. So in this case, you'll remember I said, This is under exposed. If I drag it to the left, that's going to decrease the exposure even more, and that's not helping, is just making a darker and it's squishing are hissed, a gram skewing even more to the left. On the other hand, if I increase this exposure value, you'll see that that is stretching out the history. Graham. It's redistributing it. So now we have a more even distribution here with the history Graham. And as I said, you don't want to really go beyond to E. V. And luckily, with raw images, you can salvage or recover more data than something like a J peg. So you can go up to two exposure values and still have a pretty nice looking image here not get too much noise going on. The reason for that is that the raw data is going to be contained inside that raw file. So it's going to be all the data that your image sensor captured at the time of the photograph. It's not compressed, so that gives us more of an opportunity to recover a lot of that data. So in this case, I don't really need to go all the way to to exposure values. So I'll go to somewhere around 1.7, and this looks really flat right now. We're gonna fix this as we continue through the course. But the next option here is the clipping threshold, and if you hover over it, it says percentage of bright values clipped out taco color picker to activate. So there's a little color picker tool right here. If I click on that that will turn this on. This automatically jumped 2.2 Here. I can double click on that to reset it, and you can usually do that with all the sliders. You could just double click on them, and that will reset them back to their default values. You can also click this little icon here to reset parameters that will reset everything to their original values. But let's just crank this back up to around 1.7. And now, with our clipping threshold, I can click on this little color picker icon, and what this is going to do is it's essentially going Teoh, determine what percentage of the bright values will be clipped out of your image. So if you turn this all the way up is going to make your image slightly brighter. If you turn it all the way down, it will make it slightly darker. I recommend just keeping this at the default value here, and the next option is the black level correction. So this is going to correct the black point of your image by making dark grey pixels black . And the benefit of this is it will add contrast to your image. I don't recommend, and neither does the Dar table team adjusting this value too much. There are plenty of other modules that will help you correct contrast or add contrast, but you can do it here. So you see, if I decrease, this value is going to shift the black point in the wrong direction and make our image lighter so it makes those dark grey pixels even lighter. On the other hand, if I shifted to the right, you'll see the left end of our history. Graham is moving there, and that's going to add some contrast, and you could see that adding contrast with this tool doesn't do a great job. That's why don't really recommend doing it with this. But if you want to, you could shift the Black Point ever so slightly here and just add a bit of black back to the history, and this doesn't look great. So let's make sure what are adding too much here. So the goal again is to get a nice even distribution with the history Graham. So you really want the lefts portion of the history of Just touch the left side, the right portion. It just touched the right side. That's not entirely true. You don't have to do that every single time, but that is typically what I try to go for. So you'll notice that when I hover over the history Graham, it also highlights the various sections of the history. Graham. So here we have a large portion highlighted here we have a smaller portion highlighted, so if I hover over the larger portion, this allows me to adjust the exposure here. So this is the same thing as dragging this first slider. So if I click my mouse and drag it to the right, you'll see that will increase my exposure. And if I drag it to the left, that would decrease the exposure. So it's the same thing as dragging that slider, but it's just doing it appear in real time on the history and same thing over here on the left side. Except this is going to adjust the black level correction so I can adjust this to the left or right, and that is shifting my black level correction there. You'll see that just gave us a more precise result when it comes to getting the history, um, to end right there on that far left side. So the reason I don't typically have the values going off the edge here is that that usually means that those values air getting clipped and so you can end up with a photo that is too dark. It has too much black level correction or a photo that is too bright and has too many blown out highlights. So this distribution here is usually when I go for so one last thing I want to point out with the exposure module is that you have this little option here that's called uniformly so if I click on that, that actually gives me the option to change the blend mode of this module or decrease or increase the capacity up to 100%. If you decrease the opacity that's basically making this layer more transparent. and it's going to lessen the effects of the layer, and you could see what it's doing in the history, Um, as we lessen the opacity there. In this case, I recommend keeping it set to 100% in the blend mode set to normal. But there are several blend modes you can cycle through here that allow you to blend the exposure result with your original image. And that's gonna be true for most, if not all, of the modules found in Dar Table. If you wanted to preview what this image looked like before and after the effects, you can come over here and click the exposure option to turn it off, and they click the activate button and turned back on. And there you could see what our image looks like after that's it for this lecture coming up next, we'll dive into the shadows. Highlights module 18. Shadows and Highlights: in this lecture, I'll be going over the shadows. Highlights module. So this module allows you to recover details in these shadows where the highlights of your image it will only be able to recover so many details, though, So if you're image sensor has blown out highlights in it. For example, he took a photo staring at the sun, and you have a bunch of ultra bright pixels that were not properly captured. It will not be able to recover the details from those pixels, but because this is a raw image, the module does do a pretty good job of recovering details, at least details that appeared to be lost to the naked eye by bringing in those shadows and those highlights So you can access this module inside of the basic group and I'll scroll up here to the shadows. Highlights. Of course, you can activate this module here, using the power button that turns on our shadows, highlights and let me expand this so usually by default, your shadows air set to 50 and your highlights are said to negative 50. Also, if I come over here to my history stack, you'll see turning on the shadows in highlights, adds an entry here. So usually with this tool, you're going to increase the value of your shadows. That's why it's positive here, and you'll decrease the value of your highlights. This is going to rebounds the lighting in your photos so you could see here, even just with the default values. If I turn them off, it's very subtle at first, but when you turn it back off and turn it back on, you could see the lighting has been re balanced here. But for starters, just the shadows of my image so increasing this value is going to brighten the shadows, and it will recover those details. You don't want to increase it too much because you'll start to see a lot of noise artifacts here. If I hold control and zoo man, you'll see there's a lot of color and luminous noise there. That's a concept will cover later on in this course. And if I decrease the shadows value, that's going to darken the details there so you'll see the shadow details now become darker . That's not what we want. So usually I recommend sticking between 40 and probably 70 is a good Max for this. In this case, I'll go closer to the 50 default value. Maybe, like 55. The highlight slider allows you to correct the highlights details here. So if you turn this down is going to darken the highlights. And if you turn it way up, it's going to Brighton. Those highlights that obviously looks terrible. So does this. If you dark in the highlights, you'll notice you get what's called a halo ing effect. So that is the effect created by the transition between the highlights and the shadows. Because we made our shadows brighter and our highlights darker and we did it too much, you could see a very rough transition occurring there, and that is going to create this sort of hey lowing effect. This is actually something I see very commonly in people's photography. Even experienced photographers will do this, especially when they're trying to recover details in something like a very bright sky. So this is something you want to avoid, and we can do that by making sure we don't turn the highlights down too much, and there is also a setting in here that can help us correct that. Hailing, going on, Let's go with around 74 for now, minus 74. You do still see the hailing there, but we'll correct it in a moment. So next I'll come over here to my white point adjustment. This slider allows me to either increase or decrease the white point. The white point is going to be the point at which the raw processing software is going to consider bright pixels absolute white. So by increasing the white point, which is shifting it to the right, that is going to increase the brightness of our photo. And if we shifted to the left, it will decrease the brightness of our photo, the reason being that by shifting it left, we are decreasing the amount of pure white pixels in the image. So usually I like to increase the white point a little bit just to brighten it up so you could see that our history Graham is also shifting as we do that if I go the opposite way, it'll darken it. So let's go with the round two. So the next option here is softened with, and this is actually the option that allows us to correct some of this Hey, lowing there is still Hey, lowing, even though it's subtle, you could see this rough transition here, so this is essentially the way this transition is occurring. If you don't see a lot of hailing going on, you can keep this set to gouge in. Otherwise, switch it over to bilateral filter. This just changes the method of the transition between the shadows and the highlights. The radius slider is essentially going to affect the size of the transition area, so if I turn this down, it will decrease the size of that transition area. It's also going to almost create a sharpening effect. Not really, but it does kind of have some of that effect here. But it's decreasing the softness there of that transition, whereas if I turn this way up is going to increase the softness and it will actually enhance the hailing going on. So you typically want the radius to be below 100. If you want to decrease the amount of hail owing happening, hold control. Zoom out. It's still not totally getting rid of the hailing there, but it is minimizing it somewhat, and you can also come back after you've changed the soften with method and readjust the highlights in the shadows. Go with something like that and come back here and we'll just readjust the radius. Maybe I'll go with something around 50. Here's before. Here's an after next is the compressed slider. So this is determining the value range that this is affecting. So it's either going to affect your shadows and highlights just the mid tones or some sort of combination of both. So if I turn this all the way down, this is affecting just the mid tones here. And obviously that doesn't look great if I turn it all the way up. This is affecting the extreme ranges of the highlights and the shadows, so that also doesn't look great. It almost looks like what our image look like before we even had the shadows and highlights , as you could see there. And if you go closer to 50% this is going to distribute this effect amongst the three different value ranges of your image. So typically you want to stick to somewhere around 50%. For this, I'll go with something like 55. The shadows color adjustment and highlights. Color adjustment is going to allow you to add or remove saturation to these shadows and highlights of your image. I recommend keeping these shadows said to 100% and the highlights you can sort of adjust and see what you like. I'll probably add some saturation of this. If you decrease this, it'll decrease the intensity of the colors in the highlights, which is sort of these areas anywhere where you have brighter pixels. So if we go all the way to 100 you could see the intensity of the colors returns here to those brighter areas. We don't necessarily need to bring out all the colors using this tool here, this slider, because there are several other modules that will add saturation to our image, and it's going to do a better job anyway, so we'll just keep this set to a relatively low amount, if not the default amount. And by the way, if you wanted to reset this to the default or any of these sliders, you could just double click, and that will reset the slider back to the default. I'll keep this to a higher amount that we had it at, so these were just some preliminary settings here. If you wanted to use a preset, you can come up here to the little hamburger icon, and there are some presets that come with this tool. You can also set your own so you can click the store new preset option here. In my case, I went with the preset from when I edited this image before, So if I click on that, you could see the settings I did before were slightly different. And you guys can feel free to copy these settings if you want to use thes instead. If I hit Control C, that'll back me up to the edits we just made throughout this lecture. So these were the edits I'll stick with. But that's it for this lecture coming up. Next, we'll show you how to use the tone curve module. 19. Tone Curve: in this lecture, I'll be covering the tone curve. So I'm going to start by collapsing the shadows and highlights there from the last lecture . And I'm going to come over here to the tone group, which is where the tone curve is located. And here you'll see the module for the tone curve, so I'll click on that to expand it. So this module allows you to adjust the tonal values of your image, using what's called a Grady and Curve. And for starters, it's going to start off as a diagonal line, and the far left side of the diagonal line is going to be your shadows and the right side is going to be your highlights. So goes from bottom left to top, right? And right now you can't see the history Graham. Here there's a grid, and usually there's a history. Graham. Sometimes you just need to change the color space here. So, for example, if I go to lab independent and then I switch back here to RGB linked channels, you'll see now we have our history. Graham here. So sometimes that's just what you need to do to get the history Graham to generate their. Ultimately, This tool allows you to adjust the brightness or contrast of your image as well as some of the colors in your image. So it is similar to other modules in that sense, although the main difference here is that the adjustments are made using a grading curve, and that curve is going to create different values versus using something like a slider. So a slider produces just positive or negative values, whereas the grading curve does produce those positive or negative values as well. But those values are going to be sitting on a curve, So let's dive into making adjustments on the tone curve. Here I will actually start with lab independent channels, so RGB links channels is going to be the composited image that's going to contain all of the values as they're seen here in the history. Graham. So you've got your value. You've got your red, green and blue channels all on a single history Graham here, which is totally fine if you want to use that. But I'm just gonna demonstrate using the lab independent channels, both to be able to edit the luminous and various color channels of this image and demonstrate what the lab color mode does. So the lab independent channels allows you to separate this into a luminous as well as the A and B channels. So the a channel in a lab color space is going to represent green and magenta, as you could see here on the grading curve. And Thebe Channel is going to be blue to yellow, so I'll start by coming back over here, toe luminous. Which, of course, is essentially the brightness and the contrast. And so to make adjustments on our curve, we start by clicking on the curve to create what's called a note. So if I control Click, that's going to create a node right there on whatever spot we clicked on, and it's going to leave the curve intact. I can click and drag this note outside the tone curve there, and that will get rid of that note. And by the way, by making edits to the tone curve, it's automatically activated the tone curve so we don't need to turn it on. But you can turn it on their manual if you want, and it did create a entry in the history stack here. So once again control quick to create a note. You can create up to 20 notes here on your curve, and if we click and drag the note upwards, you'll see that's going to brighten the image and everything above the original line here. So you guys can probably faintly see this line. The original diagonal line. This represents the original values of the image. If we click and drag the curve upwards, that's going to brighten the luminous values of our image. And essentially, the curve is going to determine the amount that's being Brighton. So we're brightening this value here from the original spot on the curve by this amount. So it's a pretty decent amount up to the node, and you could see all of the portions of the curve. That air pretty well above the original line will be brighter. Whereas as Thekla curve starts to come back inwards towards the original line, these values will still be lighter. They just won't be as light because they aren't as far away from the original diagonal line there. So that's something to keep in mind. And if I control, click on here and I dragged this downwards. Now we're making these values darker. So all of the values below the original diagonal line are darker. And that's just going to be from essentially this point here to this point. And because we're on the left side of the history and the left side of our grid, this is affecting the shadows. So we are darkening the shadows here, whereas up top here we are brightening the highlights. And any time you brighten the highlights and dark in the shadows, that is going to create contrast. And this shape of the curve is called an S curve. So s curves are going to create contrast here in the image as you could see. So here's a before here's an after so we've had a contrast. If you drag the bottom left note here, this is playing around with the black point, and you guys will remember what the black point is from previous lectures. That's just adjusting the amount of black pixels in the image or the point at which pixels are determined to be absolute black. So you could see our history am adjusting here as we adjust our black point. So if we bring it down on this axis here, the X axis. This is going to make our image darker by increasing the black point, whereas if we bring it upwards here on the Y axis, you'll see that shifting our history and the other way. So that's decreasing the black point there. And if we just keep it where it waas, this is going to maintain our original black point, and the top right is the same. Except this is adjusting the white point here. So if we bring it down on the Y axis, that is removing the amount of white pixels in the image, whereas if we bring it across on the X axis, that is increasing the amount of white. So let's come over here and reset the parameters. That's going to erase all the nodes on here and bring this back to original values of our image so you can add up to 20 nodes on here. So if I just control and click across my entire curve, you could see we can add up to 20 notes, and that allows us to have quite a bit of control here over the tonal values. Let me hit reset. I don't really need 20 different notes here, and you'll see that when I reset my parameters, that brought me back to the RGB links channels. So I'm just gonna come back to the lab independent channels and we'll come back to the luminous channel here. And if I hold control and click on the middle, that will create a node and you'll see that when I edit on the right side now. So if I just click and drag, which, by the way, I can just click on the curve here, and that will create a note automatically. But you'll see that as I adjust this, this is only affecting the right side of the image, the highlights of the image. So this is sort of clamping all of the values below. Here in the shadows. It's not affecting those anymore. So that's just a good way to sort of keep the other aspects of the curve from being affected here. And then I can come over here, click in, edit the shadows independently. In this case, I'm just creating an s curve again to add contrast. Bring up the black point. Not too much, though, So now we've got contrast in our image, and that is the luminous channel. So let's move on to the A channel, which again this is going to be green to magenta. So the same principles are going to apply to this channel. Except instead of just affecting the luminous values of the image we're going to be now affecting either the green or magenta colors in the shadows or highlights of the image shadows being in the bottom left highlights in the top, right? So same principle here. If I click on the curve, I can drag this value up, which you could see that's adding magenta to the highlights or I can drag it down. And that is adding green to the highlights. So that isn't great. So same thing, I'm just going to increase this slightly here to add some magenta to the highlights you could see that will affect the green and magenta colors here in the history, Graham. And then, if I come down here, I can either add green to my shadows or I can add magenta. So I'm gonna add a little bit of magenta here to the image in the shadows, like so. And actually, maybe I'll bring this backups lately. All right, so next I'm gonna come over here to the beach channel that is going to be blue or yellow, and it's gonna be the same principles here. So we can either add yellow to the highlights or red blue to the highlights, or come down here. Add blue to the shadows or at yellow to the shadows. So that's blue. That's yellow. And if you shift this note in the middle here, this is going to affect the mid tones. So if I shift this up, this will add yellow to the mid tones. If I shifted down, that will add blue to the mid tones. So sometimes that is effective. And in this case, I think I will add some yellow here to the mid tones. Very little there. So here's before. Here's an after the last thing I want to point out here is there is a color picker tool. So when you click on the color picker tool, you can come over here and just click on a pixel, and this is going to show you with a vertical line here where that pixel is on your image. And so if you wanted to edit that individual pixel or that area where the pixel is. This just gives you a sort of reference point. And then I can come over and make adjustments along that vertical line there, as you could see. And that just is going to allow you to make adjustments to that little pixel you selected. I'm gonna bring this back in a little. There's before there's an after. All right, that's it for this lecture coming up. Next, we'll get into color balancing and color correction. 20. Color Balance and Color Correction: in this lecture will be going over color balancing or color correction for your image. And there are quite a few modules that will get the job done for this, and there's even an entire group dedicated to it. So there is the color group. Let me just collapse the tone curve here and come over to the color group so you'll see a module here titled Color Correction. And right now I have this turned on so you could turn it off or on. And you would think this would be the best option for color correcting your image. But in my opinion, this is closer to what's called split toning. Split toning allows you to add color to the shadows in highlights of your image. So you had one color tone to your shadows, one color tone to your highlights. That's why it's called split toning, and the reason I say that is that you'll see there's a white dot in the middle, and when I click and drag this white dot that is going to add a color tone to your highlights. And then that reveals a black dot. And if I click and drag the black dot Around this will add a color tone to your shadows. So I do like this tool, but I don't think it's really color correcting necessarily. I think it's more so split toning on your image, and there is actually a split toning module in dark table as well, so that makes this kind of confusing. But I don't really recommend using the color correction module four color correcting. So I'll come over here and turn this module off and collapse it. The module I recommend for color balancing or color. Correcting your image is the color balance module, so I'll click on this to expand it. And you can, of course, click on this to activate the module, and that will show up as an entry over here in your history Stack. The first option for this is the mode, so this allows you to select from three different modes. Lift gamma gain for pro photo RGB slope, offset power for pro photo RGB or lift gamma gain for S RGB. And these modes are all just determining how your changes are affecting the tone curve. So I recommend just to keep things simple, going with the first option here lift gamma gain. You guys can, of course, play around with those settings and see which one you like best. But the next option here is the color control sliders. So this gives you three options. H s L R g b l or both. So this is just determining how your color correction is affecting the image. What sliders you have available to make those corrections. So if I come over here to the color control sliders dropped down, H S L stands for huge saturation lightness. That's what I have selected right now. So that's going to give you sliders for your hue and saturation. And then the factor is essentially going to be or lightness. So that's what you can change with this option selected here. On the other hand, if I go to RGB l, that's going to be a red, green, blue and lightness. So here we have red, green and blue lightness once again will be the factor option there, and you can also select both so you can have both rgb l and H s l. So here we have hue, saturation, and then we have red, green and blue sliders and then we still have that factor. Slider there. If you want the most control, I recommend going with both. That way you can adjust the hue saturation in all three color channels for every value of your image. So you have the shadows, mid tones and the highlights values here. In my opinion, it's kind of overkill. Toe have the hue and saturation being edited for the shadows, mid tones and highlights throughout the image. But I can see specific use cases where you need to go into the mid tones, for example, and increase the saturation there. But I think as a general rule of thumb, you don't really need to do that every time you're editing an image. So I'll come back up here and changes to RGB l. And now we can just color correct, using the three different color channels here for the shadows, mid tones and highlights. But coming back up to the top Here under master, you have a couple of saturation sliders here, so the input saturation allows you to adjust the saturation of the original image prior to color, balancing the image. So if you wanted to tone down the saturation of the original image. You can bring the saturation down if you wanted to pulled the saturation up, which is of course, going to increase the intensity of colors. You can bring this value above 100% here, so above 100% is an increase in saturation. Below 100% is a decrease in saturation. And of course, I can double click on this to reset output. Saturation is going to decrease or increase the saturation of your colors after you apply color balancing, so I recommend saving that for the end. Contrast, fulcrum and contrast allow you to add contrast your image. The contrast fulcrum essentially allows you to adjust the point at which your shadows are made darker and your highlights are made lighter. And the contrast, of course, is just adding or removing contrast to your image. I do recommend saving both of these for the end. So now let's get to the color balancing here. So starting off with the shadows, this is going to allow us to adjust the colors of the shadows in our image, and you can see here it says lift slash offset. This is based on the setting you have a top here under mode. So again, this is just how the tone curve is being affected. So we have this set lift, so come down here. So now when I'm adjusting the red Shane Oh, this is kind of confusing because it says red, but it shows up as a scion color. This is because removing red add scion, whereas adding red, of course, is going to add red. Or it's going to move science. So the opposite of red is going to be Sigh in when you're making your color corrections here. So all you have to do is drag the slider to the left or right. So this is either adding scion to my shadows or it's adding red to my shadows. And this part is really up to you as to how you want your colors toe. Look in your image. In my opinion, there's not really a right or wrong here is just whatever. You're wanting the colors to be here. So is your creative choice, and the next option here is green. So again it says green. But blow it. It is magenta, and the reason for that is that whenever you remove green. From your image, you're adding magenta, and whenever you are removing magenta, you are adding green. So again, this is up to whatever you think. Your color should be in your image, and the next option here is blue. So whenever you are removing blue, you are at a yellow, and whenever you are removing yellow, you're adding blue. So in this case, were either adding yellow to the shadows or adding blue. I'll just leave this to yellow here because I think that looks pretty good. And the factor slider again is going to add lightness. So if you wanted to, you can lighten up these colors here in the shadows. Well, just lighten these up a tiny bit there and let's move on. So here we have the mid tones, and this is going to be the same concept. So we're either adding red or we're adding science to the mid tones of the image. And next, we can either add magenta or at green to the mid tones, and finally we can add yellow or add blue, and then we can adjust the factor here. So this is the lightness of the mid tones. You could see that makes it much lighter. This makes it much darker, and this gives you a good idea of what the mid tones are in the image because those areas are being darkened. So we can maybe lighten this up a tiny bit, and now we move on to the highlights. So the highlights here are the game or the slope, so I'll start with the red slider here, so we can either add red or scion to the highlights. Add green or add magenta, and in some cases it doesn't look good to add either. So you can just double click to reset that 20 and we can add blue or add yellow to the highlights. So next we can adjust the factor here so we can increase the lightness or decrease the lightness of the shadows. So let's scroll up. You can see a before and after so we can deactivate this. This is what it looked like before the color correcting the color balance. Turn it back on. Here's the after so again we have the output saturation here. This allows us to increase or decrease the saturation for our final colors, so let's just see what this looks like if we increase the saturation. So I like the way this looks. And then we can add contrast here. I'm gonna leave the contrast fulcrum set to the default. But I can increase the contrast in the image. Or I could decrease it. You could see by decreasing it and makes the image flatter. So I do want to increase the contrast slightly. So maybe to about right there, if I come up, I can turn this module off. So that's what it looked like before turning back on. Here is the final. All right, so that's it for this lecture coming up. Next, I'll show you how to white balance your photo. 21. White Balance: in this lecture, I'll be going over the white balance module, So white balancing is something that occurs in your camera. You can either perform it manually or automatically. Essentially, what you're doing is you're using the color white as a base to properly set up the rest of the colors in your image. And white balancing is based on color temperature, which is going to be in Kelvin. So if you have a lower kelvin temperature that is typically going to produce a warmer image . So, for example, sunrises, sunsets, those have a lower kelvin temperature as well as warm light bulbs. On the other hand, those higher kelvin temperatures are typically going to produce cooler images or bluer images. So, for example, a blue sky day or a brighter light bulb, so you do typically want to properly white balance your camera based on the lighting settings at the time you take your photo before you bring them into dark table. So to get to the white balance module, lets collapse the color balance module here and navigate over to the basic group, and then I'll come down here to the white balance module, so this is automatically turned on and it's over here in the history stack already because this is coming from the cameras. Exit data ex If data is just the data that is attached to each photo that has the basic camera settings applied to them. So these air coming in from the camera where I took this photo and you could see what happens when I switch the white balancing off so you could see this gives it this really awful green tent and all the colors are off here and I can turn this back on this will bring all of our colors back. I do have a more in depth lecture on white balancing that I uploaded to my fundamentals of photo editing and gim course, which I will add to this course as well to give you guys a more in depth overview of white balancing. But with this module, you'll see we have several sliders here, and I'm just gonna go through these quickly. So the first lighter here is the 10 slider, and this is either going to add magenta or green. You could see a lower tint. Value will add magenta. A higher 10 value will add green. You also have the temperature slider, so this once again is in Kelvin. If you increase the temperature slider here, you would think that would add blue because, as I said, a higher kelvin temperature is blue. But the reason this is the opposite is that this is saying that okay, there's going to be a lot of blue in this photo because it is a higher temperature. Therefore, I'm going to compensate by adding orange. So that's why it's going to make your image orange. When you set this to a higher Kelvin versus If you send it to a lower kelvin, it'll add more blue. The next lighter here is the red slider, so this is either adding or removing red. Of course, whenever you remove red, that's going to add science. Then you have green, so that's either going to add green or it's going to remove green and add magenta. And finally you have blue, so you're either adding blue, where you are adding yellow. So that is what happens when you remove blue. Of course, let me come over here and just reset this back to what we had it at before. You'll also see there is a preset value here. I'm gonna get into that in a moment. But first, I do want to point out that when it comes to adjusting the white balance here, I recommend just using the temperature slider. If you want to manually adjust this the reason being that the color channels here will automatically adjust as you adjust the temperature slider. So you'll see that as I dragged this, the various color channels here are automatically adjusting themselves no matter which direction you pull this in. So in this case, we could make this warmer, for example, slightly warmer. And that's something else I want to point out, which is that any time you make an image warmer, you're adding orange to it. Any time you make an image cooler, you're adding blue to it. So keep that in mind as you are editing. But now come down over here to the preset option. If I click on this, this gives you a variety of options here. So the first option is camera. That is what is going to show up by default. So this is going to use whatever your camera settings were at the time you took your photo . So if you're white, balancing was totally off at the time he took the photo. Choosing the camera setting is going to produce a totally off white balance here, so it might not produce the result you want. On the other hand, you have camera neutral. So this is going to be whatever your camera has determined is a neutral color temperature. In this case, it's right around 6500 Kelvin. And because our actual white balancing our actual color temperature for this image was lower, so you'll remember it was about 5300. I think that's going to make this image more orange because this is higher and Calvin than the original color temperature of the image. So again, any time you increase, the Calvin of the original color temperature is going to add orange anytime you decrease the color temperature of the original photo. So any time you said it to lower, its going to be blue coming back to the preset. Here, you also have these spot option. What this option does is it grabs a neutral gray color from the image and it white balance is off of that. So This is close to how your camera would manually white balance a photo if you held up something like a white card. And you said that as the color white except instead of using pure white here, is using a neutral gray color you'll see here. This is pretty close to the color temperature that we said originally inside the camera. So this is a pretty effective way toe white balance if you have an incorrect white balance coming from the camera, so now I can come over here and the remaining options are going to be the automatic white balancing options from your camera. So if you guys aren't using a cannon or, more specifically, a Canon seven D, which is what I use for this picture, you may have different options here, but these are going to be based off of commonly used color temperatures. So, for example, this is daylight. So this is a typical day in the middle of the day, Then you have shades. So this is, you know, you're taking a photo in the shade of a bright, sunny day, so you know the shade of a tree or something, and then you have a cloudy day, so of course you got clouds overhead. Tungsten. So this is just a type of light bulb. Obviously, as you could see here, this white balancing is totally off because we were not inside. But tungsten lights are going to be a warmer light bulb color. So that's why this is going to be closer to 3000 Kelvin and you have white fluorescent. So that's something like you're in an office environment and you have fluorescent lights overhead and then you have a camera flash here again, these are all the default presets from my camera. So the camera flash is re using either the built in flash or an external flash in our photo . So that's going to produce something closer to 6000 Kelvin, which of course, is a higher kelvin than the actual color temperature, this image. So that's making our image more orange. But those were just the various presets you can choose from going to come back up here to camera because I was pretty close with the original white balance here. But again, I do want to add perhaps a bit more warmth, maybe right there. So the dark table team actually list white bouncing as one of the earlier image adjustments you make. And I actually disagree with this because I like to have my brightness and my colors in my image sorted out first. I think when the image is too dark and the colors are all off, it's hard to tell what the color temperature is supposed to be, whether you want it to be warmer or cooler. Whereas in this case we've got a lot of the colors in focus. Now the brightness is nice and bright. The shadows and highlights are balanced, so now we know whether or not we need to add a bit of warmth or make the image cooler. So, in my opinion, I think it's a little easier to perform white balance after you've performed a lot of the brightness, contrast and color corrections to your image. All right, so that's it for this lecture coming up. Next, we'll go over the noise reduction module 22. Remove Noise: in this lecture will be going over noise reduction in dark table. So there are two main types of noise that can show up in an image luminous noise and color noise. Luminess noise appears whenever a pixel contains the wrong luminous value, or, in other words, it is brighter or darker than it is supposed to be. On the other hand, color noise displays whenever a pixel is displaying the wrong color. For example, a pixel may display as pink when it is supposed to be green. As I have briefly discussed in earlier lectures. In this course, noise can show up in your image for a variety of reasons for luminous noise. The most common reason is that your photo was either taken in dark lighting conditions or your camera settings didn't properly match the lighting situation. No, he shows up in a photo because your camera sensor did not properly assigned color for color , noise or exposure for luminous noise to a particular pixel. When this happens across a large area of the image or the entire image, the photo can look less sharp and fuzzy or grainy. Better cameras, which are usually more expensive, will have a better dynamic range in, thus work better in both brighter conditions and low light conditions. The better the camera and it's censored, the better it will perform in a low light situation, assuming you have the right settings, so less expensive camera models tend to produce more noise in low light situations. This is especially true because low light situations require a higher ice Oh setting, and a higher so setting makes your camera sensor more sensitive to things like light and heat. This increased sensitivity can cause the sensor to pick up noise in the final photo. The better the sensor, the less this will happen until you reach very high. I so settings. Another source for noise is image adjustments. Whenever you make luminant or color adjustments to your photos, thes adjustments can introduce luminous noise or color noise. So coming over here to our image in dark table. If I hold the control key and use my mouse wheel to zoom in, you'll see that you can start to see some color noise here. And actually we can use the navigation panel to zoom very far in. That might be too far, actually, so let's go 400 so you could see that some of the pixels here are just the wrong color. So that's color noise. You can also see, for example, this pixel right here is the wrong brightness. That is luminous noise. So use the mouse wheel on my mouse to zoom out here, and I could move around on my image So you guys can see various portions of the image and the noise that shows up. So let's go back to 400% here. You could see a lot of noise on the black here on the hat. So these air just pixels that are the wrong color. This is showing up as like a reddish color. Of course not all this is caused by the images sensor, as I mentioned, some of this is caused by some of the adjustments we made to the photo earlier using our color correction modules, for example. So there are multiple modules for fixing noise, and I'm just going to start here by collapsing the white balance module and these modules air found over in the correction group. So click on that group and in this case, the module that dark table recommends in the module That I think is also the easiest module is going to be the D noise profile module. So there are multiple noise reduction modules in dark table. But this one, in my opinion, is the easiest and most effective. So here it is D noise profile. So just click to activate this and also click to expand it. So what this module does is it takes your camera's settings based on the exit data that came from the photo and automatically applies those settings in this D noise fashion. So, for example, it knows what your eyes so setting was at the time of your photo. And since I so is a setting that determines your lenses sensitivity, this is a good way to determine what kind of noise is going to occur on the photo. So, for example, here under profile, you'll see it says found, match for ice. 0 400 And actually, this is also camera make and model specific so you could see it says Canon Eos 70. So did find in my ex if data that this was taken with the Canon Eos seven D, and then it also matched it to my eye. So which again is down here at 400? So it did do a good job of determining what camera in I so setting I used here. And if I zoom in with my mouse will you could see that a lot of that noise has now disappeared. And let me just zoom in even further. So it has done a really good job of smoothing over that noise. The issue with some of the Denoix zing is that it can often apply too much smoothing to your image. And this can make the image look to artificial. So in some cases, you will want to tone this down and a good way to tone this down. Using the profiled de noise is to change the profile to something like a lower ice. Oh, so, for example, if I went with something like 2 50 instead, it will tone down the noise reduction slightly there, Or even if I go to 100 that will tone it down even more. Of course, this will not match my isis setting anymore. So the Denoix zing may not be as precise, and you could see that some of the noise has started to come back here, and that's not what I want in this particular case. But that is an option. And also if you increase the ice Oh, so if I go with 1000 that will increase the Denoix zing if you think there's still too much noise and in this case I don't think this is necessary. So I'm just going to switch this back to the found match here, which was an eso of 400. The next option here is the mode, and if I click on this, we have four different modes, and so local means is said to be best for fixing luminous noise, whereas wave let's is best for fixing color noise. And so what you can do here is you can go with non local means at first, and I do recommend keeping these settings the same, and we can come down here to the uniformly option. This gives us the option Thio, of course, adjust the blood mode in the opacity of this module, and in this case, the Dark table team recommends changing your blend mode to something like HSV lightness or lightness. So we have the lightness option down here as well. So let's go with HSV lightness. So this will get rid of that luminous noise, but it will not get rid of the color noise. So, as you can see, still a ton of color noise left here. But a cool thing we can do with modules, which I haven't gone over yet in this course, is we can actually duplicate modules so that there are multiple instances of that module. So to do this, I'm going to scroll up here and you'll see there's this little icon. It looks like a duplicate icon. So click on this and now we'll go to new instance. So that will create a brand new instance of this module with its own settings. So you'll see there's a little number one next to it now. And if I collapse that here was the original one we did. Here is the new instance. So the reason I want this new instance is I can change the most here to wave Let's, which I said was best for color noise, and then I can scroll down here and come down here to uniformly and will change the mode. So for fixing color noise. The Dark Table team recommends changing the motives something like HSB color or just the street of color blend mode. So I'll go with HSB color here in this case, and so this will now get rid of that color noise. So this is a good option if you apply the noise reduction and realized the image still has a lot of color noise. We're still has a lot of luminous noise. You just create multiple instances of this noise reduction, choose wavelengths for the color noise, or come down here to the first instance and go with non local means for the luminous noise . And then, of course, choose the proper corresponding blend mode for each module based on the type of noise you're trying to get rid of. And, of course, we can also change the opacity. So in this case, I think this effect is a bit strong, so what I can do is adjust capacity. If I go to zero, you'll see all the color and always comes back. But I can just creep this up until essentially this has sufficiently gotten rid of the color noise in the image, so that's pretty good 70 and I can do the same here to the first instance of this module. So if I turn it all the way down, that will bring back the luminous noise. If I turn this up, we can turn it up until the luminous noises gone in. That way, we don't have too much of this module being applied here. So you'll see our work with the D noise modules has created quite a bit of entries in history stack as well as all the entries that have been added from the earlier adjustments we've been making toe our image. So what I recommend doing, I'm going to scroll down with this little scroll bar here on the left side is compressing the history stack just to clean things up a bit here. Up until this point, so click on that button, and now you could see our history Stack has been cleaned up and there have been quite a few redundant entries removed from over here. All right, so our photo has been Dean Oise. But the issue now is that it's not really a sharp image, especially with that added smoothing here. So hold control and zoom out our image looks good, but it could use some sharpening. So next up I'll be showing you guys how to use the sharpening module in Dar Table. 23. Image Sharpening: in this lecture will be going over sharpening in dark table, so sharpening typically occurs, at least in my photo editing workflow at the end of your image adjustments. Typically, when you bring a raw photo into a raw processing software like dark table, that photo will be a little bit on the softer side and will require some sharpening. This is actually done purposely a lot of times because your photo can look more crisp when the sharpening is added at the end instead of in camera. So we're going to stay here in the correction group, and I'm just going to collapse the D noise profiled module we were working on before, and I'll scroll up until we get to the sharpened module, and I'll just quick to activate this. The sharpened module uses a common sharpening technique known as uncharted mask, and what this technique does is it adds contrast to the edges of details in your image. So, for example, if I scroll in with my mouse wheel, it'll add contrast to anything it deems a detail. So, for example, the edge of the hair here, the brim of the hat, and so on. Of course, by adding this contrast, it makes the photo look more crisp, more high definition. So these sharpen module is going to be a pretty simple module. It contains three sliders and, of course, the usual combo box. With some presets, you can reset, or you can create a new instance. The first signer is going to be the radius slider, and since the goal of this sharpening effect is to add contrast to the edges of details, what the Radius slider is doing is it's allowing you to set the size of the radius of an edge of a detail. So, for example, if I turn the radius down that is decreasing the size of the edges, and what this will do is actually decrease the amount of sharpening as well. On the other hand, if I increase this, it is increasing the size of the area. It is deeming a detail, so that typically increases the sharpening, and we don't usually want to overdo it by increasing the radius all the way like I just did here. But the sharpened module is using the gouging blur effect to set the size of your edges, and then it's adding contrast within those edge parameters with that gouging blur effect if we want to get into the technical side of things, but I'm just going to decrease this, too. Let's go with around four for now and see how that looks as we continue sharpening. Next is the amount. So this is just going to be the strength of the sharpening. So you're either adding strength or increasing the strength, which is of course, going to increase the amount of sharpness. Or, to be more technical. This is increasing the amount of contrast to our edges. Versace. If we turn it all the way down, that is, decreasing the amount, and you could see now there's basically no sharpening applied here and usually when you have larger images. So when the resolution of your images is higher, you can add more radius in amount, and it will increase the sharpening versus if you have lower resolution images, you're not gonna be able to increase the amount in the radius as much. So I do recommend keeping your resolutions set to the original amount instead of sizing the photo down, so come over here to amount, and because this is a high resolution photo. We can increase the amount quite a bit more here. Maybe I'll go with something like right there, and that looks pretty good. The threshold slider sets the threshold for the amount of deferring contrast in your image to be excluded from the sharpening. The lower this value is less will be excluded. And if you turn the threshold slider up too much, it basically renders thes sharpening ineffective so you could see its lessening. The amount of sharpening the best use case for turning the threshold slider up is, if you're sharpening, adds too much noise to the photo. So turning up this threshold slider will just reduce the sharpening a little bit, especially in those noise areas, and help to reduce the noise in your photo. I'll just double click on this to reset it, because I think it's fine set to the default value so we can turn this off years before turn it back on. Here is an after All right, so that's it for this lecture. Next up, I'll go over adding haven yet 24. Add a Vignette: in this lecture will be going over how to add a vignette to your photos. So vignettes are going to be a way to add a frame around your photo as well as allow the viewer's eye to go in on whatever your subject is focused in on your subject. So in this case, of course, it is going to be the model in the middle of our photo, and I'll start by collapsing these sharpened module here, and I'll come over here to the effects group, and here you'll see them getting so well quick to turn that on. There you could see a vignette. So what it's doing is it's adding that border. It's adding that frame, and because of the shape of the border or the frame, it allows the I to come inwards towards thes subject. I'll come over here and expand the vignette ing option and, ah, hold control and use my mouse wheel to zoom out so you'll notice. Here there are two circles. There's an inner circle known as the Radius and the outer circle, which is going to be the fall off circle. These are both circles right now because of the shape of the vignette, but we can adjust the size of either one of these. So to start, if we just the scale of this, it's going to adjust the size of both of these circles simultaneously. So if I decrease the scale, you'll see it will decrease these circles, and the vignette starts to encroach further into the middle of our image. Or I can increase the scale so that will increase the radius here, both circles and that will push the vignette outward. So I typically recommend not having this inner circle covering up your model or your subject, because what's happening here is you've got, in this case a black vignette. So everything out here is black at a constant transparency. Once it hits the outer circle, it starts to fade out, and by the time it hits the inner circle, it has totally faded out. So typically, I like to have my vignettes totally faded out by the time they reached the main subject in the photo. But you can also increase or decrease the size of these circles using the little circle icon here. And if I just click on this with my mouse, you'll see it'll squish even yet, so it'll change the aspect. Ratio aspect ratio is just the ratio of the with to the height of the image, so this is squishing the aspect ratio horizontally. We can also squish it vertically, using this little icon here. So if you wanted this been yet to be squished in, you could do that. I'll click to reset the parameters here. If I hold the control key and click and drag with these icons, it will maintain a 1 to 1 aspect ratio. So we'll keep this at a perfect circle, and we can increase or decrease the size of both of these circles here. So the outer circle determines the fall off. So this is the point at which the vignettes starts to fade out. I can click and drag this outward to make the fall off happen at a slower rate, and you could see that will cause the vignette to fade because thes stronger portions of the vignette or way out here. Or I could bring this in words which will decrease the amount of time this has to fall off . So you could see that as I do that everything outside this circle is a constant black. Once it hits the outer circle and comes in towards the inner circle, it's starting to fade out. And because we have decreased the amount of time this has to fall off, hold control and zoom in. You can see the area is where this is falling off, and it looks pretty harsh. So, in my opinion, I don't recommend having these two circles too close to each other. So you can click and drag this outward. And this is also just adjusting the fall off strength slider. So these are the same thing. Decreasing the fall off strength is going to bring this larger circle in increasing. The strength is going to bring it out, and that causes the vignette to be a little less noticeable there. The next letter here is the brightness. So this determines how black or white divan yet is. If you have this into a negative value, the vignette will be a black color. The more negative you make this, the darker living yet will be. On the other hand, if you make it a positive value, that will make this a white vignette. So how positive it is determines how bright this is going to be. I like to go with black vignettes, unless it's a very brightly lit photo that can be enhanced with the white vignette. That's just my personal preference. The saturation slider is going to determine whether saturation is added or removed to the edges of the vignette. So by default this is set to negative 0.5, so it's de saturating the areas around the outside of the vignette. As you could see, our colors are slightly de saturated in this area. If I increase it, it will increase the saturation of those areas, as you could see there. So this is up to your personal preference. I personally don't like to de saturate those colors behind the vignette like to keep the colors the same, so I'll keep this around zero. You can also change the center of your vignette. So when both the horizontal and vertical centers are set to zero, the vignette will be perfectly centered on your image. But of course, you can drag the sliders to the right was left to change the center point of the vignette so horizontal will go right to left vertical will go up or down. So they were going down here. We're going up, and if you double click on this, it will reset this back to zero. The shape if you hover over it, you can see determines the actual shape of your vignette. So we're said to an ellipse right now, which is one so you could see one produces a circle or a lips. A circle is simply in the lips with a 1 to 1 aspect ratio. So if we were to come over here to the inner circle and changed the aspect ratio, this is now in the lips instead of a circle. So let's come over here and double click on the width to height ratio, which will reset our aspect ratio. So right now we have this sets a circle, but you'll see and also produces a rectangle or a diamond. So if I put this to zero, you'll see our vignette is now a rectangle. It's more of a square shape, and if I put this closer to a higher value like a three or a four, you'll see this is now a diamond shape, so this just allows you to change the shape of your oven. Yet we'll double click on this to reset it toe one, which is that circle shape and also click to increase the fall off strength here. You could set this to be an automatic aspect ratio based on your image, where you can manually change the aspect ratio here, using this lighter so you'll see. If I drag this to left, it'll squish it, and this is being squished vertically by dragging to the right, it'll squish it horizontally. Double click on that dithering allows you to correct for something called banding. So if you have a low quality image here and the fading out of the vignette is producing these bands, and here you could turn on dithering to correct that, I don't recommend turning that on otherwise. And of course, you can come over here to the uniformly option, and you can adjust the blend mode here. I'm gonna keep it set to normal, but you can also increase or decrease the opacity of the module, and that will increase or decrease the effect of the vignette. My main advice with vignettes, though, is to make sure that they're not too noticeable. You don't wanna have a super noticeable vignette like this because this just makes it look cheesy and unprofessional. A lot of people do this in their photos. I recommend having a nice, subtle vignette so that it looks like the luminous of the photo, naturally, is fading out and therefore allowing the viewer's eye to come inward towards the subject. All right, so that's it for this lecture. Next up, I'll show you how to export your image out of dark table. 25. Exporting Your Images Out of Darktable: in this lecture, I'll be going over how to export your images out of dark table. So, as I mentioned earlier in this course, it's not necessary to have to save or export your images while you're working on them, because Dark Table will automatically create what's called an ex MP sidecar file as you edit. And that ex MP sidecar file will contain all the edits you've made throughout your photo editing process. However, you may want to export your photos at a dark table as a different file types, other than the raw photo that you're viewing inside of a rock processing software like Dark Table. So, for example, you might want to export to something like a J peg or a tiff. So that way you can easily access a preview of your image or be able to open up your image once you've finished editing it into another program, such as gimp, and perform some image manipulations or additional retouching on that photo. But regardless, you can export your photo over here in the light table tab real quick, though, before I go over there, I just want to click on the little preview so you guys can see. Here is a preview of the final image that we've been working on throughout the course. So just exit out of this window here and now I can come over here to the light table tab and you'll see over here on the right side, we have the export selected option. So when I click on that to expand it, it gives you a variety of options here. The first option is under storage options, and that is going to be target storage. This allows you to select the area where you would like to export your photo. So if I click on this, you'll see we have a variety of options we can export to Facebook flicker, Google photos, some places on the Web You can even export as an email here. If you choose the file on disk option that will export it to somewhere on your computer. Next, you can choose the exact location where you'd like to export this. So this is the address where this is currently being exported, Teoh. So if I click on this little directory, this file explorer icon here, this will bring up a little window where I can search through the places I want to save this. So if I come up here to the photography folder section, this will take me back to my main folder. And, of course, you can navigate other areas on your computer on the left side here. But here I'm inside of my main folder, and then I can click inside the bird photography folder. I can even come over here and click to create a new folder. And so here we can have a folder name. Let's just go with final edits and then click create. So once we create, it will be added inside that folder, and then I can come over here and click select as output destination, so that won't actually export it yet. That's just setting the location where we're going to be exporting this, too. Below that we have on conflict. So this is telling dark table what to do in the case where you have a file that already contains the same name. So let's say we save this as model in tall grass. This is telling dark table that if there's already a model in tall grass file name in this directory here we want dark table to do whatever it says here. So in this case, it says create unique file name. That means that this will add a unique identifier to the end of our file name instead of overriding an existing file. So in this case, it would be model in tall grass underscore 01 or something like that. We can also choose something else, like overwrite that will just completely overwrite the existing file or skip. So if we have multiple files selected here, this will just skip whatever files contain the same name. So, for example, if I shift clicked on all three of these and one of these had the same name as a follow that was already exported, it would just skip over. If I have this sets a skip, whatever image contained that same file name, the next section is the format options section. So this allows you to select the file format that you want to export to right now. This is said to tiff so I can click on this and see all of the file types available for me to export this too. So the most common one, of course, is the J peg. So once I select J Peg, I can select the quality I want export this, too, so I could go all the way to 100. Or I could go down to five for the lowest quality I recommend. If you're exporting the Web going to something like 70 if you're keeping this on your computer, you can go to 100. If I selected a different options, such as tiff, so let's go with this tiff. 8 16 32 Bit option. We have some different options that show a blow here, so tiff is a good way to export your image to a non compressed format. So J Peg is going to be compressed to an ape it image. Whereas a tiff file can be un compressed all the way up to 32 bits. The bits are the amount of information per color channel, so in a PID, image is going to have a pits of information per color channel, whereas 32 has 32 bits of information per color channel. This just allows there to be more data and thus more colors in your image, and it just allows you to perform more precise image editing in a program like gimp. So for bit depth, I can changes to 8 16 or 32 bit float. If you're planning on doing image editing inside of gimp, including retouching or manipulation, I recommend going with 32 bit. Float here, and you can add compression here or keep this set Teoh un compressed and you can adjust the compression level here. But I'm just gonna go back to J. Peg A Pit J Peg 2000 is not very commonly used, so I don't really recommend doing that. I'm just gonna go with J Peg eight bit. So next we have the global options, and the first option is to set the maximum size of your image. So this is going to be the with on the left side and the height on the right side. If you set the max size of your image to be larger than the original size of the image, it will upscale your image. As long as you have this option here said to Yes, So allow upscaling. Yes. However, if you do not want your image to be scaled up, what you have to do is come over here and just change both of these values to zero. And that will just maintain whatever the original sizes of your image if you have a maximum value that you need this to be for a project. So let's say you wanted to be something like 1920 by 10 80. You can, of course, input those values here, and your image will be maxed out at that value. So I'm just gonna set the allow upscaling to know here. High quality re sampling is going to occur whenever there is any type of scaling on your image. So when you're scaling up, you're going to be needing to invent pixels, adding new pixels wherever there were holes created. Because any time you scale an image up, you're having to spread the original pixels out, and therefore there will be blank areas inside those original pixels. So re sampling is going to occur in order to basically automatically fill in those gaps there in the pixels. So high quality were sampling is going to basically tell dark table that the final file size doesn't matter as much as having a high quality final image. The same applies when you are downsizing an image you are downscaling it because you have to remove pixels from an image, so there is some re sampling happening there as well. So this is just telling dark table. You'd rather this be high quality than trying to maintain a smaller file size. You can also set the color profile for the image, so you can either go with whatever the settings are by to fall where you can select any of these color profiles here, including, for example, adobes. Color profile. You can also said how the colors are exported based on intense here, so image settings are how the default settings are for the colors. You also have perceptual relative Collura metric saturation or absolute claure metric. So I recommend just going with the image settings. Their style allows you to add a history stack based on one you've saved in your styles before you export it. So in this case, obviously we don't need to do that. But let's say we had like, 20 unedited images, but all of them are going to use the same history stack because they are all taken in similar lighting. We can select all 20 of those images. And when it comes time to export, we can add a style to them at the same time. And that just allows us to save time without having to go in there and make image adjustments separately to all 20 of those photos. So that's just a quick way to add history stacks to multiple images. And finally, mode will display if you do at a history stack right now, this is disabled because we're not adding a history stack here just for the sake of demonstration. Let's add the history stack. So the mode allows you to either replace the history stack entirely, so that would replace all the edits we've done up to this point. Or we have the upend option and that will just, basically add in any new items to the history stack that are already there. So it's not going to replace the current history. Stack items is just going to add in the new history stack items, so I'm just gonna set this back to none. And finally, you have this little gear icon here. So if I click on that, this allows me to edit the metadata that's going to be exported with the photo, so there are a variety of options here. The exit data again was the data that originally came from the camera. Metadata is going to be data from the X and P sidecar file we created through edits Made in dark table Geo tags are tags that I did not go over in this course, but geo tags are the same thing as tags accepted. They are location specific. You can also check off the tags option, which will automatically add the tags we created earlier in this course. So if we were to open this photo and another program, it would contain those tags automatically. If we wanted to make sure our hierarchies were also maintained in our tags, we could check the hierarchical tags option. And finally, you can export this with the developed history. So this is basically the history of the changes that were made to the photo, so you can click save to save those metadata changes or click cancel. If you don't want to apply those, so click save in this case. Finally, once you're ready to export, just click the export button and here you'll see the location in the name of the image for where this was exported to. So now if I open up my file Explorer, here is our exported photo and I say this to my bird photography folder, which is kind of the wrong folder. But that's all right. So here you'll see we have photography march neighbor photography and then final edits, which was the new folder we created there in the exporting Options. And now here is three J peg file, and you could see when I hover over this, you'll see all the tags there that we added earlier. In the course, you'll see the rating there that we gave it the original dimensions, since we set the maximum 20 and then the final file size for the image, which is around 22 megabytes. So if I double click on this, that will open up a preview of our final image, and there we go. All right, so that's it for how to export your image out of dark table