mh… maybe it should be a little brighter. Here is a second version
Hi there,
here is my version.
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exposure -1/3 EV (to avoid clipped highlights)
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activate Filmic Standard
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grab gray luminance somewhere on the church-tower (color picker => 2.6 %)
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higher black relative exposure to gain some contrast (-5 EV)
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higher latitude to “filmic”
the midtones (4 EV) -
preserve chrominance to punch up the colors
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the rest is cosmetic stuff to desaturate the foreground, punch up the red in the sky a little, color denoising, sharpening and so on.
By the way: Thx to aurelienpierre for this wonderful module !
Greets
Jürgen
20181109_Cahuzeres_221_01.NEF.xmp (6.1 KB)
It was a very warm after sunset sky over an autumn landscape. More or less the tones of my original edit.
@anon41087856
What you say makes sense and you get here more than I’ve got from this image (I love shadows and midtones of your first image). Indeed clipped highlights are disturbing.
This said, I wanted to illustrate that Log + S curve (filmic like) manage quite well shadows (one curve controls the other one) and midtones, but tend to sacrify the highlights (both curves compresses the highlights). The @Carmelo_DrRaw photoflow image seems to confirm this.
Saturation remains for me a difficulty, at least for this kind of image, to get more or less the right one both on shadows and higlights.
I share the need to desaturate the shadows but I may not want to desaturate the highlights…
Then balance shadows/highlights has another pupose (shaping the S curve) than managing saturation. Mixing the effects doesn’t turn the module easier to use. Independent saturation balance would make more sense to me.
Nice … but I prefer it with a small amount of haze-removal that allows a slightly better object definition.
Some play here to mimic the S curve: GeoGebra Classic - GeoGebra.
For implementation arc portions are missing (geogebra draws them alone).
That would be a first log-like curve like this:
Followed by a contrast S-curve (sort of) like that:
But you see the drawback of not handling the saturation properly: blacks get a weird red saturation while highlights get completely washed away. Notice that I didn’t take time to tweak the curves to match filmic’s result, because creating a good log-like curve with spline interpolation is prone to cusps and really tricky.
Maybe I should drink water instead of 
That’s by design.
You will end up with out-of-gamut colors in highlights if you do so.
The non-linear part of the curve does not preserve RGB ratios, that is everything out of the latitude bounds. So it makes sense handle saturation depending on the luminance adjustements (that’s what every tonemapping algo does without telling you).
First of all, 15 years of digital photography have made people used to oversaturated and overcontrasted pictures. So that’s something to keep in mind when you compare “film-like” digital processing and “post-digital-era” processing. It’s designed to be softer.
Then, if you want to protect the highlights from desaturation, you might have to make them less highlights, that is use an exposure module, decrease the exposure, and selectively mask the highlights. Or use the neutral density filter module. Or wait for this: A tone equalizer in darktable ?
The thing is, a global transfer function like filmic will always have some caveats. The behavior shown in the samples above is what’s expected from a film emulation: compress highlights, raise mid-tones, desaturates bounds. It might not suit every need, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all anyway.
Alternatively, give more space to your white point (increase the white exposure), so your sky is not interpreted as pure white, and less desaturated:
But this falls back to basic Adam’s zone system, and deciding in which “zone” you put your sky. At the end, you need to think “how would I have done that with film ?” and translate that into filmic.
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Using your exact settings and with no other module in use (except white-balance), my curve is slightly different to the above and the results far ‘softer’. What other adjustments did you make?
Exposition: black level = 0.0050
Local contrast : default params + highlights = 152 %
Dehaze : strength = 0.10, distance = 0.250
The curve shouldn’t be different though.
Not a big difference but significant I think
set your intent to “contrasted” (== cubic spline interpolation). That looks like the “faded” intent (== Catmull-Rom centripetal spline interpolation).
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OK … I see that you used ‘contrasted’ … I had faded
My error
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My try to get close to @anon41087856’s result, using just 2 modules in Rawtherapee (auto-matched curve, and color toning w/ color regions)
Edit: I also turned on local contrast and dehaze
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See the reddish oversaturation near blacks ? I wonder if the tree in the foreground is in-gamut.
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No idea… I may try tomorrow… With just a laptop and a trackpad, it takes too much effort to try now.
I confess that your results are sweet!
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Nice one!
I guess your edit is the result of filmic + something more, or is it just the filmic module? If not, for the sake of comparison, could you post the result of filmic alone?
Thanks!
I thin dehaze and local contrast are important to add some “clarity” to that foggy scene. I also used those in my Rawtherapee rendering (I forgot about it, I edited my first post).
