Aurélien Pierre

Keep in mind that darktable really insists on doing things from the ground up, and pretty much requires you to understand the underlying pipeline and what you want to achieve. If you are just experimenting with random sliders, you aren't likely to get good results. It mostly sticks to standard industrial and scientific definitions instead of marketable names, and contains very little "magic" that is common to commercial photography software (such as saturation intentionally not being actual saturation, hidden curves, and so on). So you can use any good book on photography/videography and color science, and directly apply it to most of the stuff it has. Additionally, the developers spend a lot of their time explaining their reasoning and writing about the theory in general, for example: https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos - this channel is consistently great for both basic and non-obvious things https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 - main darktable forums, has very good discussions and explanations https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ Dr. Rant of darktable. Primarily technical stuff.

WebP produces visible artifacts at compression levels comparable to JPEG: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2021/10/webp-is-so-great-except-its-not… As Aurélien points out, if you fixate on a bunch of metrics without actually caring about the professional applications, the outcome will look... amateurish.

Any recommendations on a particular syntax highlighter plugin? Also note that you may not be able to run this setup on WordPress.com but there are plenty of hosts at the $10/month level who will be happy to host your wp install. The auto update process is pretty good too. As far as jupyter, this looks useful: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2018/05/05/make-jupyter-notebooks-easy-…

Parent was not talking about highlight reconstruction. DT has a highlight reconstruction module too but RTs was superior every time I tried. They're talking about the Filmic module which is a fancy exposure adjustment curve. I ported it to Rust for use in our internal 2D compositing renderer (not open, unfortunately). That's when I got to appreciate the work done there, really. The gainforge crate has another port, although not with all parameters of the original algorithm, AFAIR. The algorithm is explained in a blog post by the author of the module. [1] Who is btw. the same guy that got fed up with DT dev and forked it to Ansel. [1] https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2018/11/filmic-darktable-and-the-quest-…

That, or the more recent darktable UCS: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/2022/02/color-saturation-control-for-th…

> I opened the first two pictures in separate tabs and switched quickly between them. There is zero difference. Tried it on two different monitors, Chrome and Firefox. Same with the pictures of the guy at the end. One easy difference to spot is the background in this pair is posterized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterization) in webp but not in jpg: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo…

The first link in your Edit 2 section (the JPEG) one is broken, it should be https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo…

I opened the first two pictures in separate tabs and switched quickly between them. There is zero difference. Tried it on two different monitors, Chrome and Firefox. Same with the pictures of the guy at the end. EDIT: The last comparison is webp twice, he linked it wrong. Here is the jpg one, still no difference: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo…

Is this blog a joke/prank? The images don't link to the correct filetype stated. - "JPEG, lossy, 85 : 184 kiB" → links actually to a WebP file (https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… - "JPEG, lossy, 85 : 211 KiB" → links actually to a WebP file (https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… etc... So when the blog tells you that JPEG is so much better quality, the "jpeg" image that's actually being shown is a WebP image.

The first picture is very hard to spot imo. I had to zoom in a bit to spot it initially. You'll see the "blockiness" is slightly worse in the webp version. (Left side of the image, head height) For the second image, I opened the jpeg 90 [1] and webp 90 [2] versions. Comparing those two, there are clear banding issues to the right of the neck. Slightly less visible are the darker bands circling around the whole image, though still noticeable if you know where to look. Comparing the jpeg 90 version with either webp lossless, jpeg 100 or jpeg 95, I can spot some very slight banding in the jpeg 90 version just to the right of the neck. Very difficult to spot though without zooming in. [1] https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… [2] https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo…

I checked those images on Macbook 16 M2 Max (standard P3-1600 nits preset), Chrome 120.0.6099.109. All of the WebP images had pretty bad posterization, while JPEG examples did not. Edit: You have to actually click for a full size image to see the truth. Those inline images had pretty bad compression artefacts, even the supposed lossless versions. So https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… (full size lossless WebP image) looks fine, but inline version of the same image https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… looks terrible. Edit 2: The difference between... https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… lossy-noise.jpg (216 kB JPEG) https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… (150 kB WebP) https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/10/Shoo… (301 kB WebP) ... is pretty obvious. Both of the WebP examples, even that 301 kB version, show clearly visible posterization. I wonder if there's some issue with the WebP encoder (or the settings) he is using? Edit 3: It should be noted that monitor gamma and color profile might affect gradient posterization visibility.