Stunning!
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Very good shot. I keep bees and have had a few attempts to capture them with a camera - but I’ve never succeeded like this. My attempt with DT4.4.2
MJD04337.ARW.xmp (22.8 KB)
@Madko - are you in the Southern Hemisphere? As in the Northern Hemisphere by November most bees would have slowed down and reduced foraging & the last of the bee friendly flowering plants would have started to get ready for winter…
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MJD04337.ARW.xmp (12.6 KB)
My first contribution in a while. I didn’t crop or do anything to the composition, just tones and color. If I may make a suggestion starting out (since I don’t know how you are using darktable), is to set your settings to use the Sigmoid defaults as a beginner. “Settings > processing > auto-apply pixel workflow defaults > scene-referred (sigmoid)”
With that starting point on my version, exposure is raised a lot, to around +1.8. With a new instance of exposure I drew a shape around the bee and the flower, feathered it, reversed it (so it now includes everything except the bee and flower), and used that to darken the background.
With “color balance rgb” I added chroma and saturation to the shadows only, without changing anything else (this affects more of the image than you would expect).
For pushing the colors in a pleasant direction, I used “color calibration”. I didn’t have to make a new instance, but I made one for my changes and left the default the way it was. On the “R” tab, it’s just a little extra red in “input red” and a little less red in “input green”. This should effect all the colors in the photo that already have more red in them. I’m not great at this tool, but the results can be so amazing with just small adjustments.
Before I forget to add: I also turned on “denoise (profiled)” and left it on the defaults, and I turned on “diffuse and sharpen” and selected the “sharpness: strong” preset.
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I’m really happy/humbled to hear the positive feedback, I’m just starting out over these past few months so it’s super encouraging / motivating to keep trying for something interesting. I’ve been taking a toooon of photos after I got the camera a few months ago and I’m usually trying to balance interesting/sharp macros while not going above f8ish and the extremely narrow DOF there, while having enough going for it that composition is interesting. lots of learning and deleting, but I think I have another shot of this on the camera in which the bee eyes were a tiny bit more in focus rather than the curly flower petals, so I’m improving at sometimes getting fun results 
Awesome advice all around, I’m taking notes and planning to look up the specific suggestions. It’s really helpful to hear that filmic can bleach out these colors, because that’s something I would often run into and just feel like I did something very wrong, even after some slider adjustments. I’m not positive I understand the difference between the filmic / sigmoid or workflow suggestions yet, but I will look it up too. I’ve heard the terms featured, etc, but it seems like there are a lot of approaches over the years and I don’t understand what’s what or how to orient myself yet.
@dqpcoxeas lovely, artistically I’m always still working through when it is nice to rotate the macro shot, or when it looks funky due to gravity and the insect “hanging” being now rotated. This handles the focal point being slightly more on the flower petals than the bee eye really beautifully!
@Roger.Wilco I’m in north america. It snowed and froze briefly last week, but then it’s been sunny and warm again this week (before more cold tomorrow). I’m going to try to take the opportunity to visit this garden again today and continue to this week, until the bees absolutely disappear. As for the capture, I’m inexperienced at macro but I’ve managed like 20k shutter actuations in the past 2.5mo, lol, damn focus stack attempts and thousands upon thouuuusands of blurry photos in hi speed continuous shooting. The biggest help was making a diy diffuser in the style of the hood type commercial ones (photo attached). I just got the laowa 65mm 2x apo, which this was taken with and it’s a lovely light apsc lens so far. I had been using the Sony 90mm macro before, so I’m learning with this one now. I’m still trying to learn yo balance composition with being a bit (too?) obsessive about wanting to get really sharp details close up, but it’s been fun and frustrating to learn what I like.
I hope to play around with some of the files in darktable tomorrow or soon while re-reading some of the advice because everyone’s contributions have been very informative. My eyes are a bit exhausted for editing today since my job is on the computer too. I like both the darker exposure ones, as well as the brighter exposure versions that still feel balanced (something I struggle with). I’ve been taking macros in a vacuum the past 2mo without sharing too much yet, so seeing what different people stylistically see in an image is very educational and cool, thanks again!
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Thanks for sharing this beautiful shot. I did not try to enhance the colours, or to improve the composition; I just wanted to see if darktable somehow mangles the colours by default.
Here are filmic v7 and sigmoid (using the ‘smooth’ preset) renderings:
MJD04337.ARW.xmp (13.0 KB)
MJD04337_01.ARW.xmp (13.0 KB)
Oh, I picked the white balance in color calibration from the spot indicated below:
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Wonderful shot! I don’t know about the original colors, so I played a little with the image and did some color grading to taste.
MJD04337.ARW.xmp (17.2 KB)
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My attempt (darktable 4.5.0~git1108.ff5095cc-1+10846.1), trying to put emphasis with analogue and complementary colors:
MJD04337.ARW.xmp (12.8 KB)
Cool, so I gave things another quick go and attempted to get at least “not worse than ooc jpg” colors, even if the ooc jpg tastes for contrast/saturation differ and I’m not sure how to feel about them yet. I just checked the color balance rgb doc and saw " This module is not suitable for beginners with no prior knowledge of color theory, who might want to stick to the global chroma and global vibrance settings until they have a good understanding of the dimensions of color." and maybe this is where I keep getting stuck or into very weird colors. I had seen a bunch of tutorials basically stating to manage: white balance, the exposure, and then global vibrance/global chroma, then go into filmic. In this quick attempt, I tried using the 4-way tab without any understanding and at least it didn’t make things markedly worse or anything. I also applied tone masks to the leg/eye highlights to knock down the brightness a tiny bit while raising the exposure elsewhere.
I understand near 0 about color and the editing process, but I changed the workflow to sigmoid from filmic as suggested above for this one. I know my biggest hurdle may be how little I know, but It’s been a struggle for me to remember alllllll the pieces of information I’m trying to learn when a lot of it isn’t sticking quite yet, or I don’t understand.
One with haze removal attached, one without. Maybe it’s a bad idea for a module to use here, but sometimes I noticed the haze removal was pleasant at certain depths on the macros I’ve made, and sometimes making them look fake or weird.
I definitely prefer some of the thoughtfully done color renditions above, so I will hopefully try again after reading and looking at what y’all did.
MJD04337.ARW.xmp (20.0 KB)
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hi @Madko in the DT preferences you can set the workflow to sigmoid. I am not knocking filmic, but it is a more demanding tool to use.
In color balance RGB module you don’t need to be a color expert to use the sliders in the master tab. Just explore and you will find it gives you great control over saturation, contrast and I even depend upon it to adjust shadows and midtones brightness. It is one of my go to modules.
I also sometimes use RGB curves to achieve small color tweaks such as adding a little yellow by lowering the blue curve or adding a bit of blue by raising the blue curve.
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This is a lovely photo. I didn’t see a need to make any edits of consequence.
ART 1.18
MJD04337.jpg.out.arp (11.2 KB)
This version is mostly ART’s default settings, but uses the Adobe Standard .DNG camera profile, and has some minor tweaks in Lab, a little bit of local contrast, and small amount of texture boost.
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Couldn’t help myself. Here’s mine in RT
MJD04337.jpg.out.pp3 (15.3 KB)
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MJD04337-1.jpg.out.pp3 (15.4 KB)
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Hi @Madko,
nice shot, i liked the picture. But for me it lagged focus so, is cropped it heavily to make it more interesting to me. Hope you like my intepretation if you pic 
dt 4.5.0+1131~g5aba7e941e
MJD04337.ARW.xmp (14.1 KB)
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A warm welcome 
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I really cannot see any issue here. The colours look fine to me. Here’s my edit using dt 4.4.1. I tweaked the exposure a little with tone equaliser and improved the saturation of the greens with colour balance RGB. I set WB with colour calibration using the bee’s leg to sample a grey point. In all, a very easy edit with little to do.
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