That was fun! Thanks.
pr.marabou.stork.dt321.nef.xmp (16.1 KB)
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@agriggio : Initially I thought this one was too dark, but it isn’t. Also like the 16:9 (?) crop. Very nice edit.
@Thomas_Do : A Nice edit, as always. Nice use of different modules, as always. Glad to read you had fun with this one!
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I just spent about 45 minutes and I for the life of me can not reproduce the color or sharpness in Raw Therapee. I try to keep things as simple as possible, but If I could get this clarity from my images this would be a game changer.
I resized the photo in Gimp and decided to run Wavelet decomposition and duplicate the scale one detail layer and I think I can reproduce the sharpness that way. First upload is the RawTherapee jpg resized in gimp and the second photo(Sharper) is the Decomposition sharpened photo.
pr.marabou.stork-4-2.jpg.out.pp3 (11.7 KB)
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I’ve only dabbled with Rawtherapee for the moment so I can’t really help you with that one. Maybe you could have a look at @blj’s and/or @heckflosse’s sidecar files. Looking at those it must be possible 
BTW: Most edits here, @Tim’s one excluded, have enhanced/saturated the colours of the bird in some degree. Admittedly, yours does need a bit more and that might partially be accomplished by reducing the highlights, but they do look kinda natural.
You did remind me that I do need to dive deeper into Rawtherapee…
I have never really used darktable and I have no excuse. I am a sport photographer on the side and I shoot 3000-5000 images a week between High School Volleyball and Football. Thank you for your upload and the op to work on editing.
I’ve downloaded Filmulator yesterday and have been playing with it off and on for the last 24 hours or so. Here’s my attempt of this shot done in that “simple”, but rather nice RAW editor:
@254AllStar.com: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to steer you towards darktable or any other RAW editor! Photographing and post processing should be fun and I really don’t care how you, me or anybody else gets their end-result as long as they are happy with it (or see stuff that they like/want to improve).
Me, I’m basically a darktable/GIMP person but I do try other stuff too (as is obvious from the above edit…). Just for fun.
That sounds interesting (Filmulator). I have not had a windows desktop in over 10 years. (never owned an Apple). I was going to upload a High ISO sport photo for an edit challenge to see what others could do regarding noise softening while keeping sharpness right before I came across your post.
Filmulator is surprisingly nice to work with. Not as loaded with options as other RAW editors, but just enough to get good results. And there’s always the TIFF export option, so dragging it into GIMP or do some bash/command-line stuff is always an option.
You mention not having had windows for over 10 years; I switched to Linux in 1997 and never looked back. I do have a MacBook Pro, but that one also runs Debian since 2 years or so
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Thanks 
If I look at your edit you don’t have anything to be ashamed of, on the contrary. In the end it is about the result you created and people might want to know how you accomplished something (be it at random or conscious).
Then again, this isn’t so much about the sidecar being helpful (or not). Posting the sidecar with your edit is the way it is done in the Play Raw section of this board.
Anyway: Welcome to Pixls, hope to see more of your contributions!
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Ohh sorry i was not aware of that.
Thank you.
pr.marabou.stork.dt321.nef.xmp (31.2 KB)
Nice picture. I shoot a lot of birds, so I’m always interested in avian raw shots to compare notes. I used my regular workflow of filmic/exposure, tone equalizer and color balance and then some local tweaks.
Plumage can be hard… Here’s the contrast equalizer approach that I.ve been using to bring out fine detail without losing the softness of the bird, although this fella doesn’t seem to be very soft.
Note that I restrict the contrast boost to the right most bar where all the fine detail is located. Anything to the left begins to make the bird a bit harsh. I’d be interested in other perspectives on this.
Thanks for sharing!
PS - I don’t know why you can’t expand this photo… I can try again if someone has a suggestion
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I don’t have any problems with it expanding.
I have noticed, though, that this phenomenon turns up every so often and it seems to be time/user specific. Haven’t found a way to reproduce this in a consistent way, so calling in the troops to fix it is a no-go atm.
It started working after I made the comment… go figure