> The thing is, any third-party RAW convertor will typically produce
> output which *is* different from the in-camera conversion, even after
> you spent hours of your time adjusting the curves and what not. This
> is inevitable because there's no such thing as a "correct" conversion,
> and each software package for RAW conversion works in a slightly
> different way. If you like your camera's JPEGs, by all means try
> to tweak your Darktable's styling to *approach* what the built-in
> software in the camera outputs, but be advised that you can only get
> more or less close approximation, not a 1:1 match.
If you're an advanced user and willing to do some extra work, and
you really like the out of camera JPEG look, one of the things that
may help is to generate a custom base curve and tone curve for your
camera and your chosen picture style. You'll need to be comfortable
with building things from source to do this, but I think it can be done
without building your own full version of darktable.
(This almost certainly works best with relatively neutral out of camera
JPEG renditions, ones without significantly increased saturation or
contrast or the like.)
The basic procedure for this is covered in a 2013 darktable blog
post:
https://www.darktable.org/2013/10/about-basecurves/
The actual commands involved seem to have changed for me with the
current darktable source. Right now, you need to do something like
this:
- build the tools needed:
cd /src/darktable # where your darktable source code is
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../tools/basecurve
make
- use them on some good RAW files:
./dt-curve-tool-helper /tmp/DSC_1821.NEF
- follow the directions printed out to generate the data:
./dt-curve-tool -z -e /tmp/DSC_1821.NEF -n 16
You may want to save the output of dt-curve-tool in a file, because
it's a shell script containing some commands to run to add new module
presets to your DT database. *SEE ITS DIRECTIONS ABOUT SAVING A COPY
OF YOUR DATABASE BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING*.
My brief experimentation so far shows that this can get a result that is
much closer to my out of camera JPEGs than darktable's normal default
rendition. As set up initially by the script it's a module preset[*],
so you don't have to use it all the time.
(In my case I usually like darktable's rendition, but I was playing
around with a RAW where the out of camera version came out nicer than
what I was initially getting in DT.)
- cks
[*: it sets up presents for both the base curve module and the tone
curve module. I *think* the tone curve version must be applied
with the base curve module turned off, but I haven't experimented
deeply.
]
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