Thanks for sharing. Was a good exercise.
DSC05578.ARW.xmp (7.9 KB)
Thanks for this image! I went for a “natural”, less saturated look. Because the dynamic range was not that high, I tried to fix it without filmic (just exposure and color balance).
Thank you for a beautiful image. I really like it the way it started! But, here is my attempt: exposure, color balance, filmicrgb, and color zones. Then, maybe I cheated, but I moved to GIMP and took a final shot at the colors.
What sort of colour tweaking did you do in GIMP?
Well, I didn’t really do anything except click Color → Auto → Color Enhance. It looked better, so I kept it.
Later. I just got a new PC, and I just now found darktable 3.2.1 for my distro. I redid my work carefully in darktable, only, still using only exposure, color balance, color zones, and filmic rgb. I like this one much better.
DSC05578_01.ARW.xmp (6.1 KB)
I’d suggest to use tone equaliser to bring up the exposure a bit in the shadows in the valley. Check out @Bruce_Williams video on YouTube for a good introduction to tone equaliser if you are not familiar with that module — it uses a guided filter based on a mask, and as usual Bruce explains how to use it in quite practical terms.
Perhaps I’ve gone a bit too far with the shadows, but I like to preserve my natural perception of detail in the shade. It’s a struggle with every midday summer landscape.
Thank you for sharing!
Thank you all for the edits, I analysed them one by one and Indeed I found inspiration, especially in the way some of you used Color Balance to compress dynamic range.
Also, personally I don’t like the result when local adjustment modules are used too heavily, and this includes the tone equalizer. I find the result too obviously digital if the adjustments are more than +/- 1EV approx.
I figured out a possible workflow that would work in these cases:
I got this edit with the above procedure, which I like more than my initial one.
@MarcoNex Thanks for this thread. I’ve been having the same issue with filmic and high dynamic range myself. Posted a similarly difficult image in much earlier stages of filmic. I’m going to try your method.
What has surprised me a bit with filmic is that I understood is as a tone mapping tool but it’s quite difficult to map tones with it At least if those tones are towards black.
I share your views on local tools as well. It’s so very easy to make the image look ‘wrong’. If possible I avoid local edits. Filmic feels a bit like first you break your image then you build it back up when it’s weak and has no ability to defend itself.
Well, it’s a play raw, isn’t it? Everything allowed
If OP asks for something specific, we should keep it in mind, but I also see no problems here. If OP isn’t interested in a different software they can simply ignore it.
Thanks very much. I watched that video and I’m sure I learned from it. I’ll try to use what I learned on this image…
Later - This is what I got using only tone equalizer and filmic rgb. @Bruce_Williams 's video gave me the info to make all the difference. Thank you, again, and thank you, Bruce. I intend to watch many more of your video presentations.
DSC05578_02.ARW.xmp (5.3 KB)
Forgot to sat that if you increase contrast in Color Balance this will also increase saturation, unlike filmic, so it will produce a more vibrant look. It’s matter of taste
I’m a little late to the party, but here’s my take on this wonderful image. I processed the image in DT 3.2.1 using my usual modules which took me under 5 minutes start to end.
In filmic I adjusted the white and black relative exposures until they looked right
I used the local contrast tool with a multiply blend mode and opacity set to 25%
In tone equalizer, I boosted the shadows a bit, but not too much as that - to me - didn’t look right.
In color balance, I used the hue eyedropper to adjust mid-tones. I tried playing with the saturation and contrast sliders, but decided to leave them where they were - I’m fighting a tendency to ‘over-cook’ my images with too high contrast and over-saturated colors but I think I did all right in this image.
I also increased the exposure a bit
I also used demosaic (AMaZE), perspective correction, lens correction, and the contrast equalizer (deblur: large blur, strength 3) to round things out.