Your horizon halo is introduced by your strong settings in the tone eq. It is better to be more targeted and subtle with this module and use multiple instances if you need to rather than hitting your image with a big tone curve in the module…
Taking an easier way out I would just in this one crop out the sky (esp since it is blown). Its a problem and doesn’t really add to the shot. For me the walkway and its extension in to the background is the main element so cropping out the sky might even add to this…its all perspective…here are a couple of edits I did just for an alternate look…one is a bit warmer
Boris at 2.95 ev I still see a black mask…is it different for you …just wondering why 2.95 as the threshold in FIlmic reconstruction…if the mask is black is it doing anything even when you up the iterations to 9??
Just a dirty edit, basically LCh reconstruction + pulled down highlight + para mask on CB RGB to colourize the white a bit. Because filmic reconstruction doesn’t do much (colour bleeding from high iteration).
Not sure if it’s appropriate for this forum. Some sites frown upon these kinds of messages to remove extra off topic conversation.
Thank you all for the help and efforts and pointers. I’m just a beginner who has discovered the dials on camera have purpose beyond setting in auto mode. For last few months, I’m in experiment/ask/learn phase and trying to understand the basics.
You’re good. Unless you’re being uncivil (which you’re not), the worst thing that will happen is that we will move a post to a new thread if it is really that off topic. But we don’t really do that very often.
In your camera you see the histogram of the jpg that the camera shows.
I recomend you to set the profile of the jpg as flat as possible (depending of the camera you have: “flat”, “natural”…). The goal is to learn not to burn big areas of interest. The histogram can help you but you need to compare with the raw that you get.
Sometimes the jpg shows you that you have some burnt pixels and in Darktable you can check that there aren’t.
Are you same Boris Hajdukovic who has Youtube tutorials/videos? If so, I liked/commented on your video other day and tried to use few of the things I learned from your videos. Good videos and it shows power of darktable - feels like magic.