A boring image for me, because that bird is always hiding in the bushes.
I tried some modules to bring some life in it.
Can we transform the colors to pastel/water color in Darktable?
Edit:
While posting I noted that the exported jpeg is not the same as what I see in the DarkTable… and often the output was lagging and had to zoom in and out to see some effect, working blindly sometimes.
EDIT:
I’ve tried to get a more pleasant look with open source tools. I developed again in darktable, less aggressive, especially regarding noise reduction. Then I upscaled with gimp. After that, I used upscayl once with Ultramix balanced and once with DIgital Art model. Afterwards I blended both in Gimp again and added a touch of sharpness. Don’t know if it was worth. It looks more natural on a larger scale. Anyway it is far away from what I would expect from a nice photo.:
If it were my own collection, I probably would have given up on this one as it’s just too chaotic - branches everywhere. But it made for an interesting challenge during a nice break from work.
I went for some fake early-morning mist over the water to help clear away some of the chaos. I still don’t think it totally works, but I had fun!
It looks to me that the denoise and sharpen module is only shown in fit mode.
note to myself: even at 100% we can see a lot of details (the brain at least can make us thing that), this being shot by a canon lens that is cheap and older than the body.
One quick way to sort of visualize the impact of full screen preview scaling vs being zoomed to 100% is to enable the focus peaking mask…now zoom in and out and see how it changes with the screen scaling…
Basically you are on many monitors at about 25% zoom for a full screen image , your sensor might have 2 ,3 ,4 or more times the dimensional pixels than your screen has so how it handles the “averaging” as you scale the image for viewing can impact your impression of the image…
Basically it can also impact your impression of sharpness or noise…
In any case it has been my experience in DT that if you look at your image at full screen preview and export with the HQR settings set to no… your impression of your exported image will be a better match. often than if you set it to yes…
On the other hand if you select yes then things will appear even at full screen to reflect details a bit more as they looked when you zoomed in 1:1 or 100%…
In some images you likely won’t be able to tell the difference depending on the image and what edits you applied…
