Apparently, a circular rainbow is also called “Glory”. Took this picture on a flight but the contrast is really bad…
I pushed the sliders to max, while trying to keep it a bit realistic. I would be interested to see what strategies you employ for rainbows!
Yes it is hard one! IMHO the hard part is to increase saturation etc only for the rainbow part, without pushing it in the clouds too much. I noticed for many other rainbow picture the same… With naked eye it looks really good but the camera cannot really capture that.
For anyone who struggled with regaining contrast, the Dehaze module in Darktable took care of that in a snap with no need to go above default limits on any sliders. That or setting (probably any, but in my case a Vignette) module to Multiply blend mode. The downside of the latter method was that it made some other contrast modules not behave quite as expected, particularly the Skew on the Sigmoid module.
Couldn’t quite get the Glory to shine like I thought, so I just had some fun with it. I did most of the adjustment for exposure and black point by just sliding the histogram to the right, then cranked the vibrance, made various color adjustments in the color eq, applied astrophoto denoise just to see what would happen, tweaked the contrast eq, cropped, denoised with non local , tweaked the rgb primaries, and just a whole mess of things.
This is a great capture and I’m thankful that you’ve shared it.