I have this picture I took on a sunny day. I’d like some details to appear in the snow, but I’m not sure how to do that in Darktable. I’ve tried the diffuse and sharpen module, the local contrast module as well as the contrast equalizer module, but I don’t find anything satisfying.
The Boris Tone Equaliser trick immediately comes to mind on this one; he has a video demonstrating this exact sort of thing, and had an example on a snowy mountain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQGoCyns7_g
On top of that, I have a pretty harsh Colour Balance RGB instance cranking contrast on the foreground.
The history stack is compressed so don’t pay attention to the order of things there.
(White balance looks a little warmer on mine; maybe a small chroma addition to highlights and power in CB RGB 4 ways (first instance) can adjust that.)
Default settings for these are designed to put values waaay above 100% (‘display white’) back to 100%, so values that start around 100% get pushed and compressed down below that. It can become a little back-and-forth between the tonemapper compressing highlights, and modules like tone equaliser or colour balance rgb pushing up the highlights.
Here is my edit.
For balancing the shadows, midtones, and highlights, it really helped to use the auto-picker for pivot target output. Just clicked it and it really helped balance the whole image.
Also, for pumping up the detail, I used the local contrast and the diffuse or sharpen modules.
Thank you, Todd. That fixes it. But I hate performing operations where I have no idea what I’m doing, and this is such a case. Maybe I can learn to understand it.
