Another happy little doggy with some crazy lightning

Thanks for the image. Lately, I have been trying to create my own RawTherapee presets and it is always good to be able to try them out on various images. Sometimes they work great (but other times they completely flop :roll_eyes:) Here are some that seems to work well with this image. The only edits I did were loading my presets, enabling resize and saving.
(Presets require RawTherapee 5.8 dev version or higher)


High key (hard).pp3 (16.3 KB)


Faded memories.pp3 (16.3 KB)


B&W.pp3 (16.4 KB)
(This one could use the exposure pushed another quarter to half stop, but that would be ‘cheating’)

A natural look, through experimental raw converter, just saturation 1.15 and wb 5200K:

My 2:1 take with darktable.
DSC03483.ARW.xmp (20.8 KB)

Beautiful dog and picture. And I like your edition!
Mine is more “classical”… And a little flat, so that I’m seeing it again. Perhaps I’ll try to improve it later if find time. :-/
dt 3.6.1
DSC03483.ARW.xmp (13.9 KB)

I was not happy… and I’m still not, but don’t have much time just now. So, A fast retouch on this basis. But still not convinced with my edition, this is far too overdone to my taste, I think that’s not the way for me…
DSC03483.ARW_02.xmp (19.2 KB)

This one seemed a bit trickier than I thought… I’ll see if I can explain. I ended up ‘sort of quickly’ with this (dt 3.7.0+1077):


DSC03483.ARW.xmp (49.1 KB)

The start and basics were pretty simple. You overexposed the bokeh balls near the chair (and some other parts), but nowhere on the dog. Those balls will be blown out, but that is actually sort of nice.

So, basic exposure to get the dog properly exposed, activate filmic, turn up lattitude and hit auto. Tweak white till the bokeh balls are just about ‘pure white’. Filmic results ends up being a bit flat. I went to the tone-equalizer and tried the ‘contrast curve soft’ preset, then ‘curve medium’ and decided to stick with that. Tweaked the highlights (+ev) to be back at 0, and then made the curve a bit smoother:
image

This actually gave me the contrast I wanted, I felt no real need to add local contrast a lot or something.

I did add local contrast, bilateral almost 300% details, coarseness +/- 30 and contrast 3 to get some details to be more visible. Used a parametric + drawn mask to quickly select ‘only the dog’. (Parametric to select the luminance range the dog was in, then with a very big brush drawn over the dog, play with feathering + blur + opacity to get a somewhat nice mask. No need to be precise here).

Went to color-balance-rgb, add the ‘basic colorfullness’ preset, and start boosting vibrance + global saturation + global brilliance to a level I liked. Play a bit more with other parameters but in the end they don’t really contribute that much

At diffuse ‘aa filter’ preset, move it under ‘input profile’, add diffuse ‘medium lens blur’ preset.

Now, the issue…
the top of the head of the dog is then a bit flat. There is some nice contast in the shot there (turn everything off including the default exposure, and you see there is some highlight sheen in the hair on top). But filmic has squished that all down to preserve the highlights of the background.

I ended up adding another ‘tone equalizer’ Before the exposure module (under the exposure module). I messed a bit with the mask parameters to have some contrasty mask where the sheen on the top hairs where standing out, then I bumped that level up to be matching the highlights in the background. So I made it brighter to match the other highlights more. I bit of drawn masking to make sure I only apply it on the dog-region, and now filmic doesn’t squish it as much.

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@jorismak
Good job. Your edit is pretty much spot on the natural look. Although the foreground was not directly in the sunlight, it was still much brighter than some edits here show.

I was thinking about posting an as natural as possible edit yesterday for comparison.

Starting from this point I like to add a little bit saturation and warmth. Unfortunately the saturation-slider in my main post freaked out pretty much. :man_shrugging: I prefer my edit from Aug 11.

I was not happy… so I’ve tried again. Just looking for the more realistic I can get (it’s my more usual style…). So, I got this. Nothing very special. More a remembrance than artistic. And starting to trying dt 3.7.0-beta (I could resist to experiment with it).

DSC03483.ARW.xmp (10.8 KB)

If you turn everything off , including the default exposure, you get this:

I find (so, personal opinion) those little sheens of the light hitting the dog from behind very important to preserve. And this isn’t easily done while preserving something of the background as well.

Just boosting exposure (nothing else enabled) shows that there is a very easy natural look to the dog:

So I started messing with the tone equalizer, but how do others do something like this? Specially curious if someone of the Rawtherapee crowd can describe the approach :).

RT5.8 dev


DSC03483.jpg.out.pp3 (16.4 KB)

@jorismak sorry I’m not sure what you’re asking. Can you clarify? :slight_smile:

If someone can describe step by step what they do in rawtherapee and why.

I read sometimes that darktable is too complicated, but when I then take a look at rawtherapee it must seem like the dark arts to most :).

I’m hoping someone can do a simple edit (like this playraw) with all the new toys in recent rawtherapee with step by step explanation, so I get more of a feel for cause and effect :).

Unrelated : all RT posts in this playraw seem so warm and colorful, the dark is way more ‘dark golden’ then most DT edits. Is that the color profile in RT for this camera? Or is this DTs color science at work?

Neither.

I can only talk about my own edit but I did not like the camera WB at 4500K and warmed up the image to 5800+. This, primarily, gives it its dark golden glow. At the time I knew that @apostel338 liked a warmer image, so I went for that look. Mine does not reflect a natural look, I’m aware of that. This is what it looks like when I reset WB to its default camera setting and leave all the other settings:

I’m not so sure if either of them are that complicated to be honest. RawTherapee has many, many tools it can use and that can be a bit overwhelming at first, that is for sure. The current darktable, talking about scene referred here, is simpler in that regard. Without going into which one is better: Both have a somewhat steep learning curve.

About doing a step-by-step: The way I learned is by bisecting pp3s from other people to find out what module/setting influenced which part and experimenting with all the (sub)modules. No RAW is the same, though, each needs its own approach.

I do have a initial approach to my way of editing, but at a certain point (after the technical part of the edit) I let the image and/or my imagination lead me and pick a tool that I think I need to manipulate some part. This doesn’t always work though, but this is why I like RT: There’s at least 1 other tool that can do something similar.

Can’t offer you a RT edit, but I tried my hand at preserving the bright part on the head.

I first tried Tone EQ and Exposure with masks, but then this area just looked like flat mud.

Then I tried Color Balance RGB with mask, this seems to work fine for me. I think you are right with preserving some detail in this area, it looks better to me too. But I wouldn’t darken it too much.

DSC03483.ARW.xmp (16.8 KB)

I don’t think it’s a color science thing. I think you could achieve same-ish results in DT. It’s just a different approach I guess. Maybe the RT interface leads you to playing with colors more but I don’t know.

Anyway, here’s a little rundown on my edit (that is actually very simple and not using any new tools at all) for this image. Please note that I go back and forth between the tools all the time so the order is not really accurate.

  1. load my @Andy_Astbury1 inspired base .pp3 (with a pretty conservative curve applied)

  2. crop (in this case eye in the horizontal center and on horizontal harmonic means line) and level

  3. highlight compression slider to tame the highlights a little

  4. second tone curve to add some contrast (my base-tone curve usually lifts the shadows too much so I mostly use the second one to adjust that.

  5. soft light around 20% usually gives a pleasing “pop” in color and contrast.

  6. Lab adjustments. In this case I only used the 3 sliders. I realized it was too dark so I started with lightness and then had to compensate contrast and chromaticity accordingly.

  7. Local contrast. I’m very careful with that one. I found that 0.5 is a nice value for dark and light areas to keep things in check.

  8. H/S/V. Desaturated the background colors a little while keeping the oranges. I also realized the image was too red/magenta so I adjusted the white balance a bit and also pushed the Hue of the oranges a little more towards yellow.

  9. Color adjustments (Lab, the simple one). Played with the white point while checking the vectorscope to find the correct hue for the fur. Put the white point there. Black point in the opposite direction until it looked good to me.

  10. Shadows/Highlights. Highlights at 100/100. This is another way to add some more color and push the highlights down a little in a pleasing way I find.

  11. Pretty tight vignette since the subject is perfectly in the middle.

Oh yeah, and I agree with @Jade_NL that checking out PlayRaw pp3s is a great approach to get a grip on the software.

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well, the thing with pp3s and xmp’s from Darktable is that you see the end result. But not why something is done and what the take was. It’s fine to know that you adjusted 100 sliders for example… but which one first, what was the decision tree.

I’m playing around with RT 5.8-3244, with the local color-adaption tool, JzChHz mode and such.

It’s nice, but I’m a bit confused how I got there :P, and I miss that ‘sheen’ spot on the top of the dog for example, and I have no clue how to approach it in RT.

But I guess that is because I used DT more or it just ‘clicks’ for me, :man_shrugging:

You need the Local Adjustments and use the Settings section to create a mask/shape. @Andy_Astbury1 has (at least) 2 video’s about how to do this (the basics of it):

If you are coming from darktable then it is a bit of getting used to but they are rather powerful. You do need to practise with the Transition Gradient and Shape detection to get the hang of those, I sure did.

If you look at my pp3 you see a very simple version: Selecting the eye to lighten it up a tad. These edits I also make use of it: Grab Landscapes and multiple: editing landscapes to…

You must have merged lagamciezcam into your dev build. I’ve been doing some testing on that one for jdc (the developer) and that one is still being actively developed, tuned and changing all the time (especially the JzChHz parts). Although it is a really nice future addition to the Local Adjustments tab I would not use it for anything serious! Today’s edits might not be shown as intended on tomorrow’s JzChHz/Jzazbz version!

3049 is the latest, clean development build. There’s heckflosse’s dehaze branch that is rather nice but still needs some sort of interface for the feedback (output is send to the terminal atm), which would make it 3088 and there’s jdc’s Color Appearance making it 3284. Both are different branches that need to be merged into the dev branch (I’m all but sure that you know this, just putting this out there for people that don’t and start looking and asking :wink: )

In general I start with this:

These are done automatically when opening a RAW:

  • Auto applied is my base.profile. Based on Andy Astbury’s example. This doesn’t do any edits, but sets some sane starting points (he talks about it in this video)
    I use a slightly different one for my own RAWs
  • Dynamically applied self created denoise settings (only for my own RAWs)

Manually, in this order:

  • RAW tab
    • Check/change demosaicing settings according to image specs (high frequency vs low frequency vs low ISO vs high ISO),
    • set Raw Black Points if needed (heckflosse’s dehaze is a very big help here),
    • check Chromatic Aberration Correction → Avoid colour shift,
    • Set correct values for, or turn off Capture Sharpening,
  • Transform tab
    • Check lens geometry,
    • adjust Rotate or Perspective,
    • crop image if needed/wanted,
  • Detail tab
    • Spot removal if needed,
  • Colour tab
    • check/set Colour Management section,
    • check/set White balance
  • Exposure tab
    • Highlight reconstruction/Highlight compression settings if needed.

From this point on, the “artistic” stage, I do not have a fixed order of doing/checking things. I also go back and forth between certain modules a lot of the time in this stage of the edit.

In this specific dog case I used Tone curve 1 and 2 in combination with L*a*b Adjustments to go from a flat image to a nice looking base that has depth. This is one of those back-and-forth combos. I then see that I need some more details in the dog and dial in some Tone mapping.

The eye needs to pop a bit more: Done in Local Adjustments tab using a shape and the Color & Light tool.

Then CIEcam 2002 for the final lightness, colour and contrast related details. Wavelet Levels for the even finer refinements, some of which might not even be visible on a mobile or average monitor (but still :slight_smile:).

I always end with checking/setting Sharpening and Noise reduction.

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That’s a little too ‘vivid’ for commercial stock image work, and the blacks in the dogs face all have a blue cast. Just my take on it :+1:

You’re right, it’s way too vivid. I updated my version on Aug 7 and Aug 11 in this thread. Unfortunately I can’t edit the main post anymore.

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Dual processed in RT Dev 5.8-3048-gc901f644a on Mac

First process
DSC03483_P1.ARW.pp3 (16.2 KB)

Second process
DSC03483_P2.ARW.pp3 (16.2 KB)

Both sent direct to Photoshop via the export (artists pallette) button as 16bit ProPhoto TIFFs

A bit of rough brush masking, nothing fancy, just to bring those speculars under control in the background. And a tiny bit of colour dodging on the dog - again nothing fancy.

Save - job done.

DSC03483.ARW.pp3 (14.3 KB)


DSC03483.jpg.out.pp3 (13.6 KB)