My experience is different. I agree that color calibration is not that off, but most current monitors defaults have a very high brightness. For photos that you want to print, the target brightness is 120nits. I think an iphone can go above 600nits up to 1200nits for perspective.
Why don’t you post a sample, along with a sidecar showing your processing settings? Others could then give more appropriate advice, and even provide their processed versions, which would allow you to see if others really prefer a brighter look, whether you like the look they prefer, and learn how they achieved it.
I’m in the avoid overexposure camp, BTW.
Monitor calibration isn’t subjective though. And “calibration” is probably a bad word. “Normalization” I think would be better. If both your monitor and printer are calibrated, it means you can trust what you see on screen will come out of the printer-- no guessing.
“Looking OK” != calibrated. In fact. Often when I first calibrate my screens, to me they look worse, dimmer, duller color, subjectively speaking.
My post processed image, the rawfile and the side car. I hope there is no issue in uploading a file as large as the rawfile?
Looking at this one, he print is definitely a bit on the dark and gloomy front, and it is a bit challenging with the light coming through the trees. I think it could be a bit lighter with a bit more contrast, keeping the vignette. My initial impression each time I come back to this one is it is a bit dark and muddy.
DSCF9100.jpg.out.pp3 (14.1 KB)
DSCF9100.RAF (28.4 MB)
Side car file did not upload. Should I have posted this all to my webpage and just linked. Or I could paste it here as text - all 750 odd lines?
Looks like it uploaded to me.
Hi @PeteJC, and welcome!
There are about 476,593 ways to “develop” an image.
All of them are right. It all depends on what you are after.
I cannot understand why you want to “overcome personal bias”.
If you like them in a certain way that is the way to go.
Personally, I prefer to overcook contrast as well as sharpness.
Others severely dislike that. But so what? I develop my images
the way I like them.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
@Claes : What I am saying is - what looks right to me at the time of post processing looks dark when I come back to view it later and especially so as prints.
But you are correct, its a matter of taste. If working in colour I often go for higher contrast and then reduce the colour saturation. If I’m using Gimp, as opposed to Rawtherapee, I often process the image as black and white and then use a copy of the original layer over the top using it to colourize the original image. I think that is what I did here. Note, this image, in hindsight is a bit dark.
I love numbers, but they are no substitute for feelings, emotions, impressions, mood and so on. These subjective quantities are difficult to express in numbers. I would not say there is a systemic problem with brightness on the page you linked.
Quite. But I just have the feeling that I’d be better served if I brightened things up a tad as I think it is a bit of an issue rather than a style thing?
@PeteJC, good example image for what I’m about to explain, direct sunlight on a few small bits of the scene, but the rest only gets very indirect, dim illumination.
Such scenes present a far wider dynamic range than the camera can pleasingly record. In this scene, you have both blown highlights and the majority in shadow, so something has to give. Some of use say, should have exposed even less to keep the highlights from blowing, and that only pushes the shadows even darker. So, you increase exposure in Rawtherapee, but all that does is to slide the entire blob of data rightward; with that, you can only make one level of light “the middle”, all the others still suffer from their relative distance from that point.
And so some sort of selective compression of the tone range is needed. That’s what a tone curve does, pulls some tone levels up, leaves others alone, maybe even stretch some out from each other. A lot of software just sticks one in the processing chain from the gitgo, giving you a pleasing initial condition, maybe. But that isn’t what your raw data looks like; this is:
I processed your raw with black subtract, white balance, demosaic, and stretched the data to the white point. I also turned off color management, because that introduces a tone curve. The magenta spots are blown highlights; you can see their spikes in the histogram. But the rest of the image is decidedly much darker; this is what the camera recorded.
So, I turned color management back on and applied a tone curve tailored to the specifics of the image:
Oh, and I also adjusted the white point to just obliterate the highlights, as for some reason my highlight reconstruction algorithm didn’t take out all the magenta. Note that I kept the lowest parts of the tone range where the camera originally recorded them, and lifted the rest. This is not a “bright” subject, some of the gloom needs to be retained, IMHO…
The bottom line to all this is that you need to decide what sort of mood the image you captured requires in the rendition. The camera is going to record it linearly, and that may just work without modification - I’ve personally run across maybe two of my images that worked that way. But for the rest, you’ll have to shape the tone range to meet your need.
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I dunno about guru 
but i worked at Epson for 5 years and they do not change quickly 
Exposure bias is a thing i recognize , but i mostly have it the other way around in the edit.
Ever since filmic v4 i made edits that i liked , and was comparing them to my previous ‘go to workflow’. I noticed that almost always my darktable and filmic v4 versions came out brighter and a bit flatter.
Now looking at the older edits before darktable, i find them horrible strong in contrast and with too much darks. So much that in commercial software like ON1 or DxO i often now start by reducing the contrast slider.
I’ve wondered if that was 'just getting used to something ’ but i now often get remarks that they look nice and natural , and making small prints around the house they come over well … so i shrug and think it’s fine enough for me :).
But i still take the shot almost always at -1ev or even more underexposed. But - maybe the nerd side of me - i see the camera as a 'light capture device ’ , and the computer and software as ‘making the photograph’. The shot i take (as in, what the camera shows on screen as the jpg) doesn’t need to be close or similar to what my edit will look like. I record the scene , and have - sometimes 
- an idea of what i want to do with it later.
So, my brighter exposure bias has surely not come from taking overexposed shots , because i underexpose like crazy. It did teach me to feel unrestricted in what the exposure slider in Darktable ‘needs to be’, so i just start dragging to see what i get.
I don’t think there is 'a correct exposure ', so also no way to teach yourself the ‘correct’ exposure.
If you tend to make dark edits , and you like it, be done and happy :). If you tend to make dark edits , and later notice you like them brighter , start with a higher default exposure in a preset or something , to make yourself get used to brighter pictures.
Sure. Don’t worry about that. We even have a category called PlayRaw, where people can share raw files for others to ‘play’ with. If you stay around longer, and wish to contribute to the hosting costs, you may do so.
So you just wrote your own raw processor…
Interesting,thank you. Yes, I was pushing it with dynamic range. And this path is really quite gloomy at the best of times. A darker image is probably truer to life. Regarding the highlight, I was struggling to try and not overexpose it whilst trying to keep the image lighter. Given the choice I’d take sensor dynamic range over resolution any day.
I’ve had another go with the image using the Lab controls a bit more as well as retinex and have tried to make the centre, non highlight part lighter and with a bit more contrast. I think the problem here is the undergrowth to the side of the path is starting to look cluttered and distracting when lighter and with more contrast. Probally in need of more work with layers and masks if I were to want to make more of this. Or go and take the image again…
I suspect that some image makers are more comfortable making high-key images, while others tend towards low-key. Image viewers may have similar preferences.
Some words that I associate with each:
-
High key: joyful, active, optimistic, pretty, airy, growth, …
-
Low key: calm, passive, pessimistic, reflective, peril, threatening, ugly, honesty, truthful, death, …
These also depend on subject matter, of course. Similar associations come with high or low saturation, and where the points of interest lie within the image, and so on.
If a photographer tends towards low-key images and wants to break away from that, I suggest exercises that start by considering paintings. Rembrandt or Cezanne? Munch or Manet? Which resonate most, and why?
Then take photos that are deliberately high key. Frame the image so only a small proportion of the image is in shadow. Imagine a gray card in the scene, and ensure that most of the scene is lighter than the gray card. Then edit the images accordingly.
Hmm. I opened this in darktable, and it wasn’t all that dark or contrasty.
I didn’t use any modules (like tone equalizer) to compress the dynamic range. filmic is set to black: -4 EV, white: +4.4 EV:
If I auto-set both black and white:
It’s somewhat difficult to brighten up this image and keep the contrast because of the high dynamic range and the clipped highlights. That’s how I would do it:
DSCF9100.RAF.xmp (8.9 KB)
