Thanks - I did spend a considerable amount of time. I love that it looks artistic and I understand that’s what most photography is for - but I often struggle with replicating exactly what my eyes see. Unless I am shooting in broad daylight in sunny 16 conditions where the light is uniform and it’s easy to edit in a sense that I know the sky is blue and white balance is always at Daylight settings. So all I do is find a tone curve and even that often works well just on Auto settings.
Good point. Do you think in that case my highlights, as in the sunlit hills in the background, sky and moon could be brighter in the image? To make them “stand out” as you suggest?
Hi,
This is my edit in DT. I list the steps here as it may help people new to filmic.
I applied daylight white balance to capture the color how it would have been captured on color slide film (the true color?)
I applied 0.34 haze removal to just the moon using a drawn circle mask with feathering and blur for an invisible transition.
I used filmic auto tune levels, but the white relative exposure slider overshot so I pulled it back a little to put the color back in the whole of the moon.
I used the tone equalizer module to brighten the foreground as this is what you seemed to prefer. In my first attempt I had darkened the foreground because it distracted me from the moon.
I activated the local contrast module to default values. I typically do this with many images.
I returned to filmic and redid the auto tune levels and backed off the white relative exposure slider again.
I applied sharpening first using the diffuse or sharpen modules demosaicing sharpening preset (AA filter) and then did additional sharpening using the default values of the sharpen module.
I used the default values of the denoise (profiled) module. This is my default denoising method for most images.
I used the pre-set for basic colorfullness from the color balance RGB module. This is fairly standard for me when processing an image to get the colors I expect.
I returned to filmic and adjusted the contrast slider to 1.400 to give the contrast level that I wanted.
But mine is not my favourite edit here. There are numerous interpretations and it is hard to know what the original scene looked liked without being there.
Thanks for the input. I like how the moon is so prominent in your version. The time stamp on the camera isn’t accurate but the photo was taken just 5 minutes or so before sunset. So the hills on the back which are also higher are still lit with red sunlight from the setting sun as is the tops of the hills on the left. Rest of the valley and lower hills are in the shadow. And the colors of twilight had begun to popup but I honestly can’t recall how vivid they were now.
The timestamp on the camera isn’t accurate, but the shot was taken just 5 minutes or so before sunset. As such, the hills in the far background (the higher ones on the right) were bathed in red sunlight as were the tops of the hills to the left. I do recall a twilight glow of red and orange starting to show in the sky but do not recall if it was very vivid or more muted.
The haze removal tool works very well for my underwater shots so I used it on your moon, but wanted to limit its effect to jut the moon. Not having any idea of the color I chose daylight white balance. However, the saturation or vibrance might need lifting in my edit. Maybe even the contrast could be lifted.
Northern California, East Bay Interior Valleys near Livermore if you are familiar with the area. The taller hills to the right seen in the image make the western border of the Central Valley
