I have 2 pictures here, the one with richer color (red cloud and blue sky) is from my phone, the pale one is from my DSLR. The phone picture reflects to what I really see. Both pictures were taken at same time, same place, with different focal length.
How can I process my DSLR version image to make it similar to phone picture?
I would assume that your phone used some sort of HDR or DR0 mode to achieve that look.
Do you have the raw file from the DSLR? That’d be a good start! Then you can use a parametric and drawn mask to darken and saturate the sky. Add a bit of local contrast to the foreground and you should be good to go.
I messed with your DSLR JPEG a bit, and even in that there’s enough data to make it presentable. It does seem to be over-exposed JPEG-wise, but if you have the raw file you might find enough highlight data to make a really nice presentation.
That phone picture does a appear to be a bit tone-mapped. Keep in mind, what you see is different than what either camera records; it takes some processing of any digital image to make it scale to human perception. That’s the point of gamma; oh, there I go…
I did some quick testing on the RAW, but I couldn’t really make much from it. It has plenty of overexposed areas, which can’t be recovered well. Definitely not with darktable, but even not with RawTherapee’s more powerful highlight reconstruction capabilities.
Getting the vivid colors in the sky might be possible, but I didn’t venture into that yet.
I agree that the RAW is severely over-exposed. I took a quick look with Lightroom (sorry, please excuse, not FOSS) and the result looks very similar to the iphone picture. Sadly one weakness of darktable appears to be highlight recovery.
And here is a a result from darktable. Actually not bad at all and probably comparable with Lightroom. I take back my comment about highlight recovery! All I did was crank down exposure and increase shadows a bit. I also tried the highlight recovery module but it didn’t seem to help much.
I do not see a big difference in the highlight recovery compared to LR. The RAW clipping indicator shows that some parts in the back are lost. LR also seems to be not able to recover this.
The basecurve for Nikon pushes the high tone values even more. ISO 5600 is quite challenging and I’m suprised that there is still so much color if I pull down the exposure by -1EV. With color reconstruction I tried to paint in the white sky. It looks a bit overdone, but all of this is a matter of taste.
I used exposure fusion with a drawn mask to light up the mountain in the back. And a bit of haze removal over the whole image.
Mostly low pass to affect color and color noise. Levels to brighten the foreground. exposure to darken the sky. just about every module had a parametric mask. And color zones to get some blue into the sky at the top of the frame.
I guess I owe you guys a closure for helping me with ideas. Here is one of my process Sun rise in Grande camp site | Hardy Wang | Flickr same time, same location but camera pointed to different direction.