Let me start by saying that I should have taken this photo a couple of hours earlier when the sunlight was falling on the front surface of the church. Also, it is metered for highlights, but still at least one stop underexposed (for highlights).
Now I only have this photo and it’s very challenging for me to bring up all the dark areas while keeping the sky and without introducing too much of the artifacts (like halos). I’m really interested and would like to see how you would approach such photo in your raw converter of choice.
I used a combination of the Tone Equaliser, Colour Balance, and Colour Zones modules to get here, but its all funneled through a slightly odd LUT workflow I’ve been experimenting with.
PhotoFlow (raw) and G’MIC (processing). Stared at it way too long (could be the distortion at the edges bothering me), so resultant tone and colour might be poor.
Very quick play with this photograph.
Two versions pulled into GIMP using NUFraw: one with exposure adjusted for the sky, the other for the foreground. Both “tweaked” using luminosity masks and then merged using Enfuse.
I certainly like the improvement in the color. Would you mind identifying the artifacts you see for someone who is not very good at seeing those things?
The loss of colour in the cross and the clock are the artifacts. Have a look at the bottom of the cross, which has gold colour in both examples. The top of the cross does not.
Sure, I’m not very happy with my edit. This kind of artifact on the cross is produced by heavy usage of “Dynamic Range Compression” module (Fattal). Besides, there are noticeable bright halos around the building produced by “Shadows/Highlights” module.
I see that you just compressed highlights so far, yes, it doesn’t produce such artifacts I wonder how your final result will look like.
I wonder that too. But I just wanted to give you a constructive criticism as a starting point. Perhaps I will try a new version at the weekend. No promise though
Is it halo? I’m not very knowledgeable in photography, so I used terminology from computer graphics, where we generally call ‘artifacts’ any unwanted artificial things popping due to the flaws in used algorithms.
I wonder how your final result will look like.
