I’m having trouble coming up with a mask for the sky in this photo. Can someone suggest a way to do it?
PXL_20241229_083121489.NIGHT.RAW-02.ORIGINAL.dng (45.2 MB)
PXL_20241229_083121489.NIGHT.RAW-02.ORIGINAL.dng.arp (12.1 KB)
CC BY-SA
I’ve tried a parametric mask but can’t make it work for the whole sky. Short of brushing it, is there a way to do this?
This is about as close as I can get with a combination of parametric, color similarity and brush masks. Here’s the sidecar:
PXL_20241229_083121489.NIGHT.RAW-02.ORIGINAL.dng.arp (16.7 KB)
That’s a huge dynamic range in the sky, plus the hue changes so it’s really tough, at least for me and my “skills”.
My feeble attempt to combine parametric and area masks:
and increase dark sky saturation:
PXL_20241229_083121489.NIGHT.RAW-02.ORIGINAL.dng.arp (11.8 KB)
Would be nice to see results from more experienced ART users.
I feel this one would be very difficult. The sky has an non-uniform color with the sun rising towards the horizon so selecting the sky based on color doesn’t work for me.
Using my relative color area collection CTL script and Area mask.
PXL_20241229_083121489.NIGHT.RAW-02.ORIGINAL.dng.arp (12.6 KB)
You can download this CTL script from the link below.
The color area selection method of my scripts is different from other color selection tools. Its explanation of basic logic is in the link below.
There is also Japanese explanation.
Thanks everyone. @lphilpot and @tankist02 that’s basically the problem I had. Could never get it to select all the sky due to the different in colour and luminance.
@yasuo Thanks for this, I will try that script out. It looks to have produced a pretty good result for you.
I had an okay mask along the sky to land interface…for the different colors I used a parametric for most of the sky and a color similarity for that orange bit and feathered them to blend in to cover the sky…
The problem I had in ART and DT were the lines and pole for one…they are not well defined in the base image and pretty noisy so any mask trying to exclude them has pretty crappy edges with parts of the lines disappearing at least I couldn’t keep them all and then when I tried esp in DT to use the details slider there was just so much noise that it was tough esp up in the top hand corner…if I used too much smoothing or denoise to get rid of that so went the wires… There seemed to be a lot of smudged detail around the pole… in the end I didn’t get a mask in either that would hold up to any pixel peeping …maybe okay at a distance…Using the two masks in ART was about the best I got…
It was also easier in ART once I remembered that it doesn’t turn on the gainmap like DT does by default…you have to go to the flat field and enable it…that takes away a lot of the dark vignette and helps with the bright part of the sky…
Todd, could you please give an indication on what you are referring to here?
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Okay so most smartphones or many that save raw files as DNG use gain maps. You can google that if you wish…but in DT if you look in the raw white point module at the bottom you will see it activated for this image….you can also turn it off to see the impact…. In ART the same thing is available but you have to go into the flat field module or function…click the embedded box and enable flat field correction…… mostly it will clean up the strong vignette that most smartphone raw files have and it will impact a bit some of the lighting of the image…. They are now embedded in some formats to allow for both SDR and HDR image versions in the same file….
