I had a hard time to get the colors right in that photo. Still not satisfied with the result. I tried to correct it with the color balance and channel mixer module. Most time ended up with an undesired color cast in the clouds.
@age: excellent job! Just the water is to contrasty for my taste and looks somewhat muddy. So I took your edit and used “my” water (with a little increased saturation). I hope you won’t hold this against me .
Recipe:
use a single colour correction node
apply 30 pixel gaussian blur
adjust Slope to white balance the top of the clouds
adjust power to white balance the building on the far shore
remove blur
adjust power, saturation and offset to taste…
My take: The scene cried for a cinematic look. Lets imagine you shot that scene in Kodak Vision 3 50D 5203 (negative) and printed it on Kodak 2383 (FPE) D50 temp.
Step One:
Getting the Colortemp right in RawTherapee - export to Kodak Cineon Colorspace (LogM).
Simulate the Film Stock in Natron with just two nodes/LUTs for the negative/print-film stocks and render in 4K Super 35 (full ap).
What you have now is a good place to start with something like final touch colorgrading (plus maybe removing the spot in the sky). Had no time to do that, but I think you get where I’m going. I’d use darktable for that, I guess.
I’m working with Fuji-raw-files most of the time so I wondered if my workflow works with Sony as well. Check.
With a fast workstation the whole process above doesn’t take more than 10 mins. Plus you’d have a consistent film-look with all your other footage. Just fiddle with the CIE Color Appearance Module, nothing else needed.
Cheers, Helge
PS: Another thing to do would be applying some grain. Yet another node in Natron which also would eliminate the too contrasty water ripples in the foreground.
DSC00916.ARW.xmp (64.8 KB)
I extensively used masks (drawn and/or parametric) to try to properly target the background clouds, the sky, the land area … I hope the result is homogeneous enough though.
This scenery makes me dream of summer, mask-less vacations, thanks for the view !