Okay, thanks to everyone’s help, I have an edit that I think rivals my camera’s jpeg in terms of vibrance. (Maybe I even went overboard, but that’s a different discussion.)
lisbon_night.xmp (13.5 KB)
Here are the various things I ended up doing:
- I just set the white balance by hand in color calibration until the side of the building looked like approximately the same color as the camera’s jpeg (conveniently using a snapshot of the jpeg to compare).
- At 400% magnification on the side of the building, used denoise profiled (despite the lack of a profile for my camera) with wavelets, a lowered strength of 0.2, and increased preserve shadows of 1.80 to get rid of the annoying color noise in the wall.
- Darken a bit by increasing white relative exposure in filmic rgb.
- Used a second exposure with a path drawn around the shadow just to darken the sidewalk a little to make the colors pop more.
- Used the dehaze profile of diffuse and sharpen with a mask that applies mostly to the building to bring the texture back to the building wall, and give a sense of depth for the building behind the tree.
- Used the surface blur profile of diffuse and sharpen on the lower part of the picture to blur the sidewalk slightly, so as to avoid drawing attention with the texture. Used a drawn and parametric mask to exclude the reflected lights.
- Starting with the vibrant colors preset of color balance rgb: first reduced the mask middle gray fulcrum and contrast fulcrum so that the reflected lights are entirely within highlights. Then increase contrast and global saturation to get things really colorful. Increase brilliance of highlights and decrease for midtones and shadows to add even more contrast.
- Finally, because I wanted that reflected tail light to pop, I just used a display-referred color zones with a drawn mask to shift the color from orange to red.
The one thing I really couldn’t understand about the camera jpeg is how the illuminated tree at the right edge of the photo is completely red. It almost seems like an error, except I like the effect of the red tail light on the left and red tree on the right. Does anyone understands why my camera might have done this and how to replicate it in darktable.
Anyway, I’m still learning, but at least now like my edit more than the camera’s jpeg. If anyone has more suggestions please let me know. I still need to get a better understanding of color balance rgb. I now understand technically what the different controls do, but I still don’t have a good sense of, say, when creatively you want to use saturation rather than chroma, or chroma rather than vibrance. I’ve watched a ton of Boris Hajdukovic videos, and every time that he goes into color balance rgb and starts clicking it feels like magic–I see what he does to make the colors look great, but I have a hard time understanding why he chooses, say, to increase global chroma and then decrease saturation in the highlights rather than vice versa (increase global saturation, decrease chroma).