I’d like to ask your help with this family snapshot. It was taken with the camera’s built-in flash, which of course could not provide enough light to balance the backlight. I don’t feel I was able to process it well with darktable, despite several tries. The problem is that the shadow and the bright background are not well separated spacially, there’s haze in the background, and the clouds are overexposed.
Looking mostly for darktable solutions, but all are welcome.
Thanks for the attempt. Nice work on the clouds (by dropping exposure in darktable, I can see that there’s plenty of detail). The rest, to me, looks unrealistic, as if we’d been ‘Photoshopped’ there. The tops of the pines (most apparent to me on the left) are much darker than the lower branches, I guess that’s haloing from the tone mapping.
Thanks for the efforts, everyone. I’m kind of glad it was not simply me overlooking some trivial step. Although, I have to admit, you’re way faster than I was.
It’s interesting to see how different people handle the scene. I may have been better off without the flash, leaving the foreground darker, making masking (whether manually or via tone EQ) easier, but I’m not sure (there are spots with direct sunlight even in the shade – is that ‘pocket of light’ in English? ‘dappled light’?).
Yes, this is a bit like a brighter version of the JPG preview, but look at the clouds: pretty much all detail is lost. The family and the field are well exposed, though.
I think the exposure mask needs some work on the feet of the lady and the fence.
