Hello and welcome back to another video my name is Mike Davies and in today's tutorial
I'll be showing you what I think is the best way to steal color grading from any photo
using any software. Yes, that does include premium and free software. I'll be using
darktable version 3.4 which is the latest version of darktable at the time of this tutorial.
Before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com.
As always I have tons of GIMP, Inkscape, and darktable tutorials on here. You can get more
by becoming a DMD Premium Member, and I have tons of free software help articles so definitely check
that out. You can enroll in my Fundamentals of Photo Editing in darktable course on Udemy.
And as I mentioned you can get more by becoming a DMD Premium Member and I'll include a link to
this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video. I'll be
using three photos for today's tutorial. So here's the first one - these are all free from Pexels. I
went with the "large" download. Here's the second, and here's the third. These are all JPEGs - you
do not need raw photos for this tutorial, even though darktable is RAW processing software. It
does also work with JPEGs. But let's dive right in here. So I'm inside of the lighttable tab
for darktable 3.4, and if I come over here to the "import" dropdown you'll see a button here called
"image." So I'll click on that. I can navigate to anywhere on my computer to find the images I need.
I already know that the files I need are in this folder, so when I click on an image file you'll
see a little preview over here. So I can click through each one of these to get the preview,
and I already know I need this photo. And if I hold ctrl and click I need this photo too,
and then hold ctrl and click - I need that photo. So now we have all three, and I'll come over here
and click "Open." So here inside of my darkroom tab I have all three of my images opened up.
So down here in what's called the "film strip" we can see thumbnail previews of our images.
And if I come over here to the lighttable tab I can also access my images from here.
Simply double click on an image to open it up into the darkroom tab. But this is the photo we'll be
stealing the color grading from, and we're going to be using the color mapping module to steal the
color grading. This module inside of darktable 3.4 is found in the "effects" tab. If you're using an
older version it's usually in the "color" tab, and if you still don't see it inside of that tab
come down here to where it says "all modules" and just search for the module called "color mapping."
You can also use the "search module" feature up here - just type in "color mapping."
But in this particular version I know it's inside of my effects tab here. So once I'm inside the
effects tab I'll scroll down, and here you'll see the module "color mapping." So I'll click on that.
Make sure the little power button is turned on which means this effect is turned on for this
image. So here you'll notice two main areas - you've got your "source clusters" and then your
"target clusters." The source clusters are going to be the clusters that contain the colors from
what's called our source image - so that's this image right here - and then the target clusters
will be the colors that we grab from these images - so these are our target images. Below these
clusters you'll see we have three sliders. So "number of clusters" is going to be the number
of these little box sets that we have. So the more clusters we have, the more colors we're
grabbing from each image and therefore the more diverse those colors are going to be - and so the
effects will be a bit more subtle. If we use less clusters we're going to be grabbing and swapping
less colors, so the effect will be stronger. You'll see that in action. "Color dominance"
determines how the colors are swapped out. So if this is turned all the way up to 100, colors are
going to be swapped based on the dominance in this image versus the dominance in the target image.
So basically dominant colors from our source image will be swapped out with
dominant colors from the target image. And then "histogram equalization" we're going to
use to try to make the two images look more similar in terms of their tonal contrast.
You'll see all this in action as we start using this module which we're going to do right now.
So let's start by acquiring colors from our source image - so I'll click "acquire as source." So now
you'll see our source clusters fill in with colors from our source image, and then we're going to
come over to one of the target images. So let's go with this one here on the far left. So right
now you'll see there aren't any colors right here under source clusters - that's because I
have to come over here inside of the color mapping module and click on the "reset parameters" button.
So that's going to bring in the settings from our source image, and now all I have to do is
come over here and click "acquire as target." So that's going to acquire colors from our
target image and then it's going to swap those colors out with colors from our source image,
and there you can see the result of that. In this case it doesn't look great right now.
I can also come down here to "histogram equalization," and if I increase this it's
going to try to match up the histograms between this photo and the original source photo. So the
higher I go the more similar it's going to try to make those photos, and then the lower I go the
more it's just going to keep the original. And if I double click on here it'll reset it back to 50.
So let's say I don't like these settings here - I want to try something different out - what
I can do is come back to this photo here, and for example let's say I want to increase the
number of clusters. So I'll increase it to four, that'll make the effect more subtle remember,
and then I can also maybe adjust the color dominance here - so decrease the color dominance,
which means colors will be swapped now LESS SO because of their dominance and a little
bit MORE SO because of how similar the colors are between the two photos. So now we'll come
back here to "acquire as source" - so there are our colors. Let's come back over here.
If we reset the color mapping here that'll get rid of those old settings, and then come back
here - "acquire as target" - and there you can see the colors are swapped out and the
effect looks a little bit nicer there. And once again we can adjust the histogram if we want to.
So let's now try the same effect on our second target photo. So let's come back
here to the first photo, and actually we'll keep the settings here the same. Let's come
back here to the target photo. If I come over here, reset this, and then "acquire as target,"
there you can see the results. And once again I can adjust the histogram after the fact until
I get this to where I like it. And now the color grading of this photo is similar to this one. So
let's come back here and let's just try this back at two clusters. Maybe we'll decrease the color
dominance to around 50 percent, acquire this as the source. Let's come back here to this image,
reset it and then acquire this as target. And we get a different result there once again.
And we can adjust the histogram to our liking, and I don't really like the skin tones in this
particular example but you guys get the point. So that's the method inside of darktable. I have
done a "Stealing Color Grading" tutorial inside of GIMP, and I've also watched tutorials using
Photoshop. I do think that this method using darktable is the best, or at least it produces
the best final result. That's just my opinion though, of course. But that's it for this tutorial
- hopefully you liked it. If you did don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click the bell
icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can check out any of the links to
my resources in the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.