I am open sourcing my picture. I was not able to get a decent result out of my RAW image after more then 40 minutes of work on Darktable… I gave up and worked on the Canon JPG instead.
This is the original JPG where the sky was too overexposed (IMO) at least with my computer monitor.
This is my modified version, where I like the sky better but I can’t find a module to make it even a bit darker. But for me, removing the overexposure of the sky really makes a difference.
I decided to leave the ground as it is, the quality of the data in the ground is not terrible… Theory - I suspect because my aperture was 5.0 with a ISO of 100, the depth of field is not optimal to get more sharpness far away down the road.
A quick play in GIMP. The sky showed no overexposure in Filmulator, even after adding +1EV.
In GIMP I used a contrast mask and then my saturation plug-in to increase saturation in the sky.
All done on my small travelling laptop, so no idea how it looks on a proper monitor!
So this is my three minute editing attempt. To get the sky darker I unticked the the compensate camera exposure which was adding 0.7 EV correction. I then set the EV value to zero which made it a further 0.7 darker than DT’s default.
I then used the shadow and highlights module, tone equalizer module and the color balance rgb module to lighten the foreground a little. I added some extra blue to the sky using the color equalizer module. I personally would prefer the to have made the image brighter but I thought you wanted a darker sky.
First of all, always shoot JPEG+RAW whenever possible. JPEG photos are for sharing as is and should not have any lighting adjustments done on JPEG photos, at most you can do some white balance or saturation adjustments. However, if you want to get the most out of your camera, you should definitely shoot RAW photos. The disadvantage of DSLR cameras over smartphones is that they do not have functions such as bracketing/HDR. So set your camera accordingly and shoot -+2 stops whenever possible so that you can stack them later and increase your dynamic range. Also, shoot photos slightly overexposed whenever possible. It is very easy to reduce the exposure of the photos later and overexposing also allows you to reduce noise in the shadows.
There are many different results that can be obtained from RAW photos. Here are a few examples, remembering that it is after 21:00.
hi @cihaneken and welcome to the community. It is customary to post your sidecar file along with an edit in a Play Raw. Also an HD-sized rendition should be plenty, people can download the sidecar if they really want to inspect the edit. We have no interest in 16 MB jpegs. Thanks!
