High contrasts in a man made wilderness

My play. Not very artistic, but an attempt to see if I could tame the contrast!
I produced six different exposure .tif (+0 to +5 EV) from Filmulator which I blended with Enfuse.
Then into GIMP and used my saturation mask plug-in to give an increase in the medium saturation areas.

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In my initial version, I intentionally left the shadows very dark to support the golden afternoon glow.
Even so I love the overall look, I wasn’t too happy with the harsh transitions. So here comes a further edit from me, trying to keep the look but lifting the shadows and caring for smooth transitions.
Sorry for playing again with my own RAW :innocent::


IMG_4181_02.CR3.xmp (14.5 KB)

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IMG_4181.jpg.out.pp3 (20.5 KB)

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IMG_4181.CR3.xmp (8.1 KB)

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Taking another run at it…it probably had lots more shadow but it so hard not to lift the image
(relative and perceptual renders)

IMG_4181.CR3.xmp (28.9 KB)

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Another version…

IMG_4181_01.CR3.xmp (32.1 KB)

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Who said the contrasts had to be treated? Let them shine :wink:

Here is a fairly natural HDR rendition of the scene, using Darktable:

And a manually tone-mapped SDR version (still a bit too flat to my taste…)

My initial plan was to combine both versions into the new “UltraHDR JPEG” format (that interpolates between both images in order to produce the best rendition for a given display), but tooling isn’t quite there yet.

IMG_4181_HDR.CR3.xmp (11.5 KB)
IMG_4181_SDR.CR3.xmp (10.1 KB)

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Nice contrast :slight_smile:


IMG_4181.CR3.xmp (20.0 KB)

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IMG_4181.CR3.xmp (55.8 KB)

Really, really nice photograph.

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IMG_4181.CR3.arp (13.0 KB)

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IMG_4181.CR3.xmp (17.3 KB)

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The color is good but, perhaps, it is not the key element in this beautiful picture…

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My idea was to preserve the capture as much as possible. I like the Escher-y “two worlds” / “inside-outside” vibes.


IMG_4181.CR3.Ogven.jpg.out.pp3 (14.1 KB)

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my version created with Ansel + Gimp software

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Was it by intend, that the sky is partly black?
I like the rest of your edit but the black parts are irritating for me.

thanks friend for the report… in fact I uploaded a wrong copy of my editing, the one posted now is my right version, the jpeg file edited in Ansel was then further worked in the shadowed areas with the layers of Gimp. I hope my version now is less irritating to you

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IMG_4181.jpg.out.pp3 (37.5 KB)
What I did:
I only used a handful of Selective Editing spots in RT-dev using the CAM16 and shadow/highlights tools.

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Another edit some months later :slight_smile:


IMG_4181.CR3.xmp (19.9 KB)

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To me this is one of those images that has the nuance of the shadows and the massive bounce light everywhere that our perceptual vision would handle and correct but trying to edit a literal capture of the light and attempting to recreate this is at least for me really difficult…

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great