Balcony Bird edited in Darktable

jillesvangurp · June 12, 2019, 8:44am

I was sitting no my Balcony in Berlin yesterday when I was joined by a little bird that didn’t seem to mind my presence. So, I whipped out my Nokia 7 Plus and shot this using open camera in raw and proceeded to play a little with this in Darktable.

This phone camera is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s actually two cameras that are combined into one image in the DNG on the phone. It tends to have a bit of noise but plenty of contrast. It comes out washed out but that is easily fixed by boosting the contrast 200% (filmic module). Next challenge was highlighting the bird; I used the Zone module for that and some masking. I did a few more tweaks but overall was pretty pleased with the result.

birdbalcony.dng (23.3 MB) birdbalcony.dng.xmp (7.7 KB)

Thomas_Do · June 12, 2019, 5:08pm

Thanks for the picture. My try, a ittle less cropped.

birdbalcony.dng.xmp (12.9 KB)

shreedhar · June 12, 2019, 6:01pm

Nice photo @jillesvangurp and a great edit. I had a look at your xmp file and from that starting point, I made some changes. Here is my take on it.
I wanted to include more sky so as to give the feeling that the bird is wistfully longing for it! Thus spent efforts to make it attractive with bright clouds.
birdbalcony.dng.xmp (34.5 KB)