I get so lost when it comes to sky. I am attempting to edit this in darktable 4.2, but I am once again defeated by … something.
I am NOT good with this tool, even though I have used it off and on for a couple years now. Mostly it is a combination of punishing myself/having fun with technical software?
But sky! It just isn’t right. There is something a bit too muddled, the colors are just a bit off. What do you do for skies?
Jake your choice of tone mapper and/or tweaking the tone eq will help a lot… if you take your edit and apply default filmic instead of sigmoid you will instantly have a better sky and then further for this image IMO tweaking the norm to maxrgb in this case gives even a better look… Sigmoid fades to white and doesn’t have much contrast in a sky like this… If you want to use it then use the tone eq and add blue to the sky by blending in the blue channel… tweak with opacity or even better the blend fulcrum slider…
Thanks for sharing this image. I feel it is a really good image to demonstrate some of the real world challenges photographers face with the dynamic range of everyday scenes. You have dark shadows and a sunlit sky and that is a big ask to capture. This is one image where the tone equalizer really shows it power. I also did so tweaking with the color balance rgb module that I am coming to depend upon. I attempted to make the colors bold like Fuji film would have done in the analogue days. I also added extra contrast to some of the brighter regions of the buildings using the contrast brightness saturation slider with masking (I usually restrict the use of this module to non-raw files, but I achieved what I wanted with it anyway.
What’s blown is blown. The sky and the cloud are not the primary subject; I think it’s best to recover just a bit, not concentrating on details, but on avoiding artefacts.
Huh. Now that I go back and look at my original, it looks awful. All over. What have I done?!
Your posts have completely changed my perspective on what I was trying to accomplish.
The filmic instead of sigmoid suggestion was excellent - I got excited about the new module, and forgot there is a reason that darktable has twenty ways do do everything. They are all different! Instant improvement on the sky, instead of the artificial look I was getting by playing with exposure and brightness. @Terry your first edit is exactly what I would I would have done if I knew what I was trying to do. Its perfect.
WHAT? I thought it was pretty good! I have noticed my taste does sometimes ‘differ’… from the majority. I had a go at the image myself, but found it hard to improve on your original, let alone some of the others. I spent a while loading .xmp files and working out how people had done it. Play Raws are great for this kind of thing.
Thanks!
I was being harsh. Probably pissed at the skies.
When i scroll back up, I like the colors, and they are closer to what I saw in real life. Now I like it more than I did when I first woke up this morning and saw other people’s edits.
One of the things I need to figure out before I start on a picture is what I actually want to accomplish. And why? Because i just mess around a bit (like 40 minutes?!) and then it goes in my sock drawer of “good pictures” and they never get seen again.
I know how it is
About the “good pictures”, I have a Flickr account that I try to post the standouts to. I don’t do that much with it really, and hardly anyone follows me, but it looks nice! And I can point people to it if I want to show them what I do. (photographically I mean). I print some too, and pin them up on a section of wall in the living room. Not sure why I’m writing this really - its not that interesting!
I do not have much to add to the dealing-with-sky topic, there are already some pretty good attempts in the thread. But I sometimes find it a nice exercise to crop out problematic areas of an image to see if it actually helps with the story. That would be the sky in this case, does it matter that the sky is blue or is it just a distraction for what the picture is trying to say? Is it the street and group of people that are the main subjects? Or the clock tower/sky pair?
Thinking in terms like that can really help with making editing and capturing decisions!
Here is what my crop looks like, note how it doesn’t matter anymore that the sky is white in this version.
Nope, “regular person” responses apply to me!
I need to start hanging out in these playraw threads. There is some awesome stuff people are bringing to the table.
I personally find the plawraw thread a great place to learn new skills and approaches to editing images. I learn from seeing different opinions and approaches that everyone brings to the table. It also gives me new challenges and problems to solve. Some people doing morning crossword puzzles or “Wordle” with their breakfast coffee, but I like to playraw.
I struggle really hard with skies like this with RawTherapee. There have been great processings showing a realistic sky - already the first one by @Claes made me stop trying more.
Nevertheless, this is the best I could achieve, with a faint hint of blueness
I should try that! I have been known to anyway, but not as a routine.
