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:
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.