Hi all,
I would like to ask for critique for processing this photo. My main concern is if the colors are oversaturated and what to do with the under- and overflow in RGB channels (see the attached RGB parade picture): is this kind of under-over-flow problems OK or basically technical failure and must be avoided?
How would you process this photo?
DSC02988.ARW (26.5 MB)
This ARW RAW image file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
I didn’t look much at the waveform or histogram. There is clipping alright…
But - it’s a nice picture. here’s what I did with it…
Hope you like it.
Regards Jetze
Hmm, interesting, you use neither Filmic nor Sigmoid 
LOL, that was an oversight on my part. I did not intend to omit one or the other. Let me go back and see whether that would improve the image …
It may be a slight improvement, but it looks very similar.
Here is my non-edit. This is just how the image opened in DT 5.1. There is no raw clipping and there is no clipping shown when I turn on my clipping indicators.
20250519-1007-8156.cr3.xmp (19.0 KB)
Here is my edited version. Any editing by me resulted in some clipping of the highlights and shadows but for me this is a non-event and I normally would not have even checked for this issue. I don’t like editing by numbers. This edit has very white points of the flower and very black areas in the shadow which has increased the contrast. That is fine by me.
DSC02988.ARW.xmp (10.1 KB)
This is a quick edit, but mostly how I would normally approach a photo like this. I didn’t have clipping issues but I did see gamut issues in the background.
This is the same edit but I used color equalizer to pull down some of the saturation in the greens and yellows in an attempt to tone down some of the gamut issues. I dunno if there’s any better ways to handle gamut stuff but I also don’t fully understand if or why it matters. The yellow flowers are more distracting to me in this version.
DSC02988.ARW.xmp (12.4 KB)
DT has a little buffer…if say using the OE for gamut checking…often bumping it from 99.9 to 100 removes the gamut warnings…or more of it anyway… You can use the gamut compression in CC module as well it does a pretty nice job and actually applies a small amount of compression by default …most people never look at it… there are other ways as well…
For me gamut checking against srgb out of the gate with default sigmoid workflow…showed some issues in the yellow but setting to 100 removes it…
Or the sigmoid smooth preset and setting the primaries to srgb colorspace again handles the gamut…
I don’t care about histograms, I want more colors and contrast.
ART with OpenDRT:
DSC02988.ARW.arp (11.4 KB)
Thanks for the suggestions. I tried a combo of those to do a quick edit with my morning coffee with the primary objective of getting the histogram “correct” and the gamut issues mostly under control.
It has less contrast and adding in any sort of contrast and saturation undoes the “corrections” and ultimately doesn’t look as good.
But flowers in direct sunlight often look totally blown out to my eyes and trying to correct that doesn’t make things look better, in my opinion. If I take a macro shot of an insect on a flower, I’m casting a shadow on the flower and lighting it with flash. A lot more detail and nuance comes out, but it often looks unnatural because that’s not how we see flowers when casually going about our day.
I have zero expertise in any of the technical aspects of darktable, light, colors, etc. So take what I say with a grain of salt.
In my non-technical mind, I think these two quotes depend on one’s intent and end product for the image.
If the intent is to recreate an image in the exact likeness of what your eyes perceived firsthand, then saturation may matter (and who is to say if any two or more people’s perception or memory of their perception is identical; of course those of us who did not see the image firsthand have no way of knowing exactly what any particular image was “supposed” to look like;
there is also the matter of a monitor that is/is not calibrated and what your eyes perceive). If the intent is to create art with an image that is visually appealing to you/someone else, then saturation is a matter of personal taste—what is over-saturated to you may be under-saturated to someone else.
If the end product is for digital display only, then the gamut may not matter if you can achieve your visual objectives within any gamut. If the end product is a print, then the gamut possibly matters for the the printer creating the print (that being said, I simply set everything settable within dt to sRGB and I’ve never had an issue with prints, but that’s not to say problems could never crop up).
dt 5.0.1
_DSC0613.ARW.xmp (15.3 KB)
Looks like its begging for a poem or msg on the left side 
Book cover?
I am born as the sun,
But then turn into the moon,
As my blonde hairs turn
Grayish-white and fall to
The ground,
Only to be buried again,
Then to be born again,
Into a thousand suns
And a thousand moons.
(HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION by Suzy Kassem)
