Not sure if silhouettes make good play raw contenders, but I’m curious to see what direction you guys take on this. I have two examples of edits I did on a couple of my photos over the weekend. Right now I tend to lean heavy on orangish/gold backgrounds and struggle to branch to anything else. Hoping to learn more about darktable and get some inspiration. Thanks to anyone who contributes.
The lighthouse image is an interesting problem…and the bright area in the cloud stumped me. It says there is no clipping, but can that be right? Anyway. I went monochrome with less silhouette of the building itself:
For sure not. I think the whitepoint is set to a wrong value.
There is a similar thing in dt - guided laplacian. Most of the times I don’t like it that much, because it tints in my view most of the time a bit to aggresivly.
It depends on, what you are trying to show/see. If it is the whole scenery, than in principle no. If it is the lighthouse, than yes. The bright spot is anyway somewhat distracting, because there is a lot of picture information lost and therefore you can do what you want, with a pure rendition it will often look a bit unnatural. This is no critics. With a single shot you had not that much choice, if you still wanted at least a bit of information in the shadows.
A maybe better possibility is to let go a huge amount of information and blow a lot more in the highlights:
Playing with this a little more this morning. I think @Popanz comments regarding the bright area being distracting are correct. Another way to decrease the amount of information in the sky is to diffuse things (see below). I tend to learn towards his version when keeping color.
