This is not a great shot but it is a challenging shot because of the wide dynamic range in the lighting. I found the new AGX module in DT 5.3 a powerful module with such a challenging image. I have not included my xmp file because I don’t feel I have done the best edit anyway and look forward to seeing what others can do. I am particularly interested in DT edits with the AGX module, but welcome edits from other software as well.
My initial feelings about AGX is that I really like it as a good tone mapper for wide dynamic range images, but for everyday photos still feel more comfortable with the plug and play nature of Sigmoid which just works for most images of mine. Still I feel the AGX module is another great addition to the DT toolbox.
I’m not a fan of HDR. I’d try to maintain the bright contrast of the full sunlight, not to drift into a cloudy/muddy look. If I were there, this is what I think would look like through my sunglasses. The white cloud would be too bright to my eyes anyway, and it’s a good indicator of full sun, so I didn’t try to keep its details.
I too am not a fan of the HDR effect people use in image editing. Hence my use of the term wide dynamic lighting range which it certainly is. Unfortunate name I kept on my picture file from one of my editing classes. Your edit is very good but the clouds could be darker to represent what I saw in real life.
Relatively quick (by my standards, so 45 min…) attempt in RawTherapee 5.12. Tried to keep it relatively natural. My “selective editing” on the sky is horrible, though – and tone mapping somehow made this even more apparent.
Edit 2: RawTherapee did for your R7 the same thing it does for my R6m2: I have to manually uncheck the box for lens distorsion correction, otherwise it seems to try to fix something that the camera somehow already took care of.
Used G’MIC’s Dehaze for the sky and Lucis for the rest. Hard to beat Lucis when it comes to HDR results, imo (so I didn’t even bother to try; yes, I cheat and I’m proud of it. lol).
30–120 min per picture? But I process less than 10 % of my pictures. The rest is either deleted or just kept as raws that gather virtual dust. And most of the time it’s not a holiday but a quick walk nearby. Or a session spamming a specific figure in a specific location, in which case it’s perfectly “normal” to only retain very few shots.
Regarding your edit, I like how you made the house-like thing in the back, in the front of the road, stand out. I did not pay much attention to that part when doing my version.
HDR has come to mean those horrible edits where people made shadows bright because they could. Shadows should be dark. How dark can be personal taste. Your edit is very good. The shadows are a little darker than I remember but your highlights are very close. I regret naming this file HDR as I won’t use that term any more to describe a wide dynamic range of lighting. Thanks for the edit.
I personally use that term when the camera was explicitly set to HDR PQ mode. I kinda expected this raw to be like that, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Perhaps it would have made it more malleable, but you did a wonderful job avoiding clipping with the normal mode and still capturing lots of stuff.
The back story to this picture is that house-like thing was actually a hotel until they had to close it because of rock falls from the cliff. It now sits vacant. The picture was photographed in Morocco.
I have created a style for my Canon R7 based on using Sigmoid. One click and the image looks very close to the cameras JPG. I am not aiming to reproduce the JPG but rather give myself a good starting point. Many of my edits take just a few minutes or less, but some challenging images can require more patience. I also shoot a lot of very high ISO images that need care with sharpening and denoising. I can shoot hundreds of pictures in a day. I use bracketed exposures so two thirds are destined for the bin.
The rest is either deleted or just kept as raws that gather virtual dust. And most of the time it’s not a holiday but a quick walk nearby. Or a session spamming a specific figure in a specific location, in which case it’s perfectly “normal” to only retain very few shots.