Hi fellow photographers!
I got this high contrast sunset scene from the weekend. And now I’m wondering how you would develop this photo. And maybe you can explain your thought processes along with your results. I’m mostly using darktable but I’m also interested in results with RawTherapee and ART. Looking forward to some inspiration. Thanks in advance!
DSC_1804.NEF (25.9 MB)
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I tried to make it more spectacular, without completely leaving the path of Believability.
Therefor I raise local contrasts, changed WB to a warmer grade. Compressed the dynamic range and raised the colour contrast in the highlights. I as well changed the crop because I usually find horizons in the middle line a bit boring.
Finally, I tried to tame the hard to control chromatic aberrations.
My thought processes: I decided the As Shot white balance looks great. I tried filmicRGB, Sigmoid, and AgX. I felt that Agx gave me the best overall look. I used the tone equalizer to bring up the strip of land, and to slightly bring down the brightness of the setting sun. Some Local Contrast, and that’s about it.
Exposure + tone equaliser to reduce dynamic range. Second colour calibration instance doing nothing except multiply blend mode on the blue sky. The trees were on the blue side of green, so colour equaliser rotates those a bit. Also desaturates the sky and increases chroma in the yellow/orange.
Diffuse or sharpen instance 1: Sharpen demosacing no AA preset with a mask.
Instance 2: Sharpness of the water ripples.
Instance 3: Diffuse clouds (not in water)
AgX primaries are the result of me struggling to get the sunset the same colour on both sides of the water.
(Bonus: xmp has orientation set to flip vertically but inactive)
I would have been happy to have a silhouette but thought you might have wanted details in shadows. I used tone equalizer to recover some shadow and highlights as well as shadow and highlight module.
DSC_1804.NEF.xmp (18.2 KB)
Second attempt, just for fun.
DSC_1804.NEF.xmp (15.4 KB)
Another one, a bit less pop and
DSC_1804_01.NEF.xmp (15,5 KB)
more calmness:
or with a different crop:
Love this one even if it doesn’t look like it’s shortly before sunset!
Thanks so far, guys and keep it coming! The results are very diverse, I like that!
Totally different vibe. Lovely!
DSC_1804.NEF.xmp (23,6 KB)
DSC_1804.NEF.xmp (26,3 KB)
Took today off for my Independence Day. Why not have a bit of fun before I think to do yardwork. lol
Did not know what for me was the essence of this picture.
Found that it is the top mirroring in the bottom.
Decided to blacken everything in my eyes not contributing to that.
And then break the mirror effect.
Strong vignette applied.
By the way you probably have nice clean water there seeing the little insects on the water surface.
I originally was going to flip the image 180deg, but there are not enough ripples to make it interesting. Settled on 90, and then roughed in the balancing between sky and reflection. I liked the shape the lightest clouds were making so I tried to accentuate them a little
Lovely!
Sort of reminds me of a candlestick. Guess it makes for a good Rorschach test. lol
I’ve tweaked mine a bit. I perceived a halo around the trees, so I adjusted the colour calibration effect to mitigate that. Also changed white balance a little and reduced sky contrast with CB-RGB. I can add a few more iterations to the water DorS.
