We went on a walk in the mountains (a short, flat path, but the views were beautiful). The weather was hazy, the Sun often behind clouds. Let’s see what you can make from this one. Heavily underexposed but still with clipped highlights, with an ancient, 12-bit, low resolution LX7 camera.
Edit: if someone is interested, I can upload the two other, brighter files from the bracketed set. This one is with -2.66 EV; there’s also -1.33 EV and 0 EV. The LX7 has a built-in ND filter, which can confuse merging tools that only use ISO + exposure time + aperture to determine exposure.
I really hate having to deal with these semi-blownout skies, so here I’ll use it to my advantage, a wide crop, ignoring most of the sky, blowing the rest of it and focusing on a the hiker alone in a desolate landscape. (DT 4.4.2)
This is my second attempt. The first time I thought the distant hills were not clear. A blend of -1 to +2 EV - four exposures derived from Filmulator, blended with Enfuse. Into GIMP. Adjustments using luminosity mask plug-in and saturation mask plug-in.
I often will resort to using the watermark module and blend in a replacement sky. You can actually keep most of the original one if you use low enough opacity but it still is a good fix for something like that blown patch
Creative use of spot removal I was sort of amazed how RT could recover that extended area where all 3 channels are blown.
@priort : no need for watermark; @ThomasM used spot healing to clone some of the sky from the same image. That can also be done in darktable. I’ll post an attempt later.
@Flech : certainly a different mood. Blowing out the sky was inevitable, as the sun was directly behind those thin clouds.
I was sort of amazed how RT could recover that extended area where all 3 channels are blown.