How to develop photo when the subject is the brightest highlights?

Hopefully a screenshot taken from Rawtherapee (RT) will convey what is thought to be the problem for which some help is desired as follows:

This screenshot is of the raw file when initially opened in RT using the “Neutral” processing profile. The tone curve shows the histogram which I’m thinking depicts the problem. Of course I’m also a bit of a novice so there could be some doubt about that. What may not be obvious, just form the screenshot, is that the pixels associated with the subject (i.e., white boat) are on the extreme right side of the histogram. The problem I’m having is that when I try to brighten the background and increase contrast, which is pretty easy to do, the white boat becomes out of gamut (severely clipped). Highlight compression with low threshold seems to help but still not good enough.

I’ve also tried taking a .tif file created from RT to GIMP to see how that might work but results not what is desired.

Note: My objective is NOT to produce an authentic (?scene referred) image but rather something a bit more artistic which exaggerates the reflections and color (? saturation).

I suppose the answer might be “impossible objective” but thought it worth asking those with more expertise.

Hi @ajax,

Rawterapee offers quite a powerful possibilities to compress the dynamic range of the image. Just the standard setting of “dynamic range compression” module offers excellent results:

Before:

After:

You can also use tone mapping and Shadows and Highlights modules for this.

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In your photo the object of interest is white. You can use one of the LAB modules tabs to increase the lightness of chosen colours. It will only affect the selected hue.

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Using Rawtherapee (RT) I played with it some but “Dynamic Range Compression” does not seem to help. I think the problem is that it compresses the whole range whereas I think I want to compress just a small portion of the range. Both the “Highlight Compression” slider and the “Shadows/Highlights” tool on the “Exposure” tab helped. I got it about as good as I could using RT and exported a .tif file.

Note: I normally develop photos (raw files) in RT and then use GIMP for things like sizing, cropping, adding borders and text.

When I opened the .tif file in GIMP I felt compelled to see what happens when using the “Color>Levels>Auto Input Levels” tool (i.e., one button operation). It made some nice improvement in the overall scene but really blew out the subject. Therefore, I tried some manual adjustment using the “Color>Levels” tool. This looked pretty good so I saved an .xcf file and exported another .tif file. Interestingly, when I do “View>Color Management>Soft Proof” in GIMP I get the following:

Then when I open that very same .tif file in RT and turn on Soft Proof, using the same profile as used by GIMP, with the “out of gamut pixels highlighted” I get the following:

Results are close enough for government work except for the subject which is extensively out of gamut in RT (but not GIMP). By doing nothing more in RT than using “HighLight Compression” on “Exposure” tab with a value of only 10 the subject is restored to being in gamut and ends up being the best rendition of the photo I’ve been able to create.

I sort of thought I should have been able to get the same result with RT during initial development of raw file but I’ve now spent an awful lot of additional time with no success. What I’ve learned so far about “Lab* Adjustments” is that there is a lot to learn. Of the 9 kinds of curves which one/s might be the right place to start?

Check out this video: