Looking for help with raw processing in Raw Therapee, and I’m not sure how to ask. Here goes.
I have an astro shot with the sky/stars in the background and a mountain in the foreground. I’d like to make adjustments to the sky, such as increasing contrast and maybe changing temperature, while preserving the look of the mountain.
For what it’s worth, in the histogram, the sky corresponds to one peak, and the mountain corresponds to another peak.
In Raw Therapee, I understand the use of tools like exposure, noise reduction, white balance, and defringing, which I’ve already applied to my image with good results. But I’m not sure how to think about this particular issue. I try tinkering with various knobs and sliders for things that sound right, but I just don’t know what I’m doing. What’s the right approach to solving this particular issue? How should I think about it?
So the slope of the tone curve controls the amount of contrast you’ll get at a certain brightness level – the steeper the curve, the more contrast. So, where you have the peak on the histogram corresponding to sky, make that part of the tone curve steep. Where you have mountains and don’t care about contrast/detail, make the tone curve shallow. You should normally ensure that the tone curve is always increasing from left to right – if it dips down at any point, the result will normally not be so nice (known as a gradient reversal).
Temperature will be on the color grading tab – higher values make the image “warmer” (more orange) and lower values make the image cooler (more blue). If you want to affect the temperature of the sky and mountains differently, then the Color Toning module can be used.
Another approach would be: Using the Colour Toning module using a mask.
You can set a mask that gets the brighter parts (sky) by using the L (as equalizer) tab and then use the Slope, Offset and Power sliders to get the look you are after.
