I got out this morning to continue to capture a local waterfall in every season. Currently I have it in the deep of winter, and early in the spring.
Today was the summer capture.
I’ll typically spend quite a bit of time shooting the falls and then take hand held photos on the way back down the trail. Today I opted to keep the camera on the tripod and try to get some more compositions instead.
There’s many small scenes that catch my eye on the way back but at this one the sun started to break through intermittently throughout a series of attempts to catch it just right.
I never actually did get it “just right”, but dang it I was satisfied with what I did get.
The idea was to try to highlight where the sun was bathing the scene while isolating the rest without relying on a vignette. I’ve taken to using a uniform exposure blend mask in multiply mode, the color look up table, and a graduated density effect to try to achieve that.
Outside of that I have a fairly standard workflow including the tone eq, contrast eq, color primaries adjustments, and diffuse and sharpen to counter the effects of the haze removal tool adjustments. Some of it may seem redundant, as I’m using other tools to effectively lessen the effects of others…but it’s what I’ve gotten used to.
DT 5.0 Windows
Anyways…here’s the result, and I’d like to see what you’d all come up with. Not restricted only to darktable.
A great image. Thanks for sharing.
My play in GIMP. Done on my tiny travelling laptop, so others will have to judge what it looks like on a proper monitor.
I went for a slightly different take. Warning: Done on a craptop so colors may be…off.
EDIT: My eyes kept sliding off the frame with the normal orientation, whereas they seemed more focused when putting the log on the left side. Thats probably just me though.
I rarely get nostalgic over places I have lived in the past, but this photo made me miss living in Seattle/ PAC-NW.
I cut my teeth in the darkroom with dodge and burn techniques and so I used multiple instances of exposure to burn areas of this image and finished off with a vignette. So sorry, I was never going to attempt your approach here. Nice capture. Easy to process. Also recently in another post I learnt how highlights could be bleached in the exposure and then recovered later. It definitely worked for me when I used exposure to average out the mid tones and ignored what happened to the highlights. _DSC6136.ARW.xmp (33.2 KB)
That’s a great rendition of it… I like it. You’ve managed to keep the majority of the mid tones where I lost them.
I will be looking at the highlight recovery method you used… Thanks for sharing.
I couldnt sleep last night and so I grabbed your xmp to find out what “uniform exposire blend mask in multiply mode” meant. After looking at the effect, I wondered why you just didnt acomplish the same with tone eq. I was somewhat surprised to find that it was more difficult to replicate than theory might predict.
I eventually switched to base curve to get an (almost) exact match. Doing everything with exposure in multiply did preserve chromaticity better, but that is easily fixed with CB-RGB. It did mean managing the sensor clipped highlights with guided laplaciens and a LOT of iterations (as oppsed to reconstruct in filmic). I could use tone eq to get more details back.
Given your comment above regarding midtones (to @Terry ), I am wondering is the base curve might be the better tool for what you were trying to achieve. Regardless, I learned something new with this exercise.
Sometimes there are benefits to insomnia!
EDIT: Forgot to attach xmps…
Your edit paired back to crop, exposure, highlight recovery - _DSC6136.ARW.xmp (13.5 KB)
Base curve with highlight recovery (laplacien), Crop, CC-RGB - _DSC6136_01.ARW.xmp (10.1 KB)
