Hey folks, could anyone help me with darktable modules on how to improve a picture?
It’s a pretty high ISO level and a big crop, but I can’t make it decent.
This is a plain/dumb extract from photoAI
This is what I could get with DT
Is there anything I could do with it so it doesn’t look so terrible?
In case someone wants to see the original file:
DSC02458.ARW (23.9 MB)
Hi Dan!
This is the best I could get, although I’ve never been the best at pulling out the utmost from a file.
IMGP2333.DNG.xmp (5.0 KB)
hard to crop it in so tight unfortunately @duly4994. It’s really hard to throw away that many pixels with that kind of exposure.
that photoAI has done a remarkable job cleaning it up and preserving detail, but its also added unfortunate artifacts around the edges.
Hi Dan!
this is what I got out of the RAW you provided:
DSC02458.ARW.xmp (99.7 KB)
Whenever I have a tight crop or high ISO image, I use one instance of denoise (profiled; wavelets), and try to just embrace the noise and blend it with grain effects, color balance RGB (with fine tunes to exposure in the brilliance panel), and other tone curve oriented filmic edits (to boost midtones), all capped off with sigmoid compression/ fine tuning at the end of the pipe.
I’ll attach my XMP file… which I’m afraid to say might look a bit of a mess, but it’s my current filmic workflow. The tone curve modules are meant to boost the midtones (I target a sweet spot around 70IRE), which I find key to making an image look more filmic.
Took a bit of elbow grease, but I added some chromatic aberration masks to try to take out all the chroma noise near high-contrast transitions (wasn’t entirely successful, but better than where it started).
Hope this helps; good luck my friend!
Quick edits…not really better than yours… used the lut from the recent loglin post in the first pair …they are relative and perceptual renders… last two with filmic
DSC02458.ARW.xmp (28.7 KB)
DSC02458_01.ARW.xmp (17.8 KB)
your balancing of noise reduction to detail preservation is excellent, second to none in the thread by a long way for mine, but the image is let down a bit by the blue treatment bleeding into the wingtips.
what software are you using?
Thanks 
Indeed, a bit too quick in the masking.
I’m using darktable (4.6 to be released shortly).
As I said in a previous thread I always let the luma noise almost untouched to avoid a flat-plastic like rendering. When printing this is not even visible and it keeps crispy details.
Another denoise challenge…
That’s what I could achieve. I second that too much noise reduction leads to a plastc look. So the goal is to keep the noise even and controlled.
Here is my version. I got a bit carried away, again 
So, you probably don’t want to look into the XMP 
Your edit here is a png file which seems strange. Is this just a screen capture of darktable ?
What kind of modules did you applied in the darkroom view ?
Could you share your XMP file ?
@foto the context included in your crop is better than the tight crop on the bird alone. The picture is now telling me a story about a single bird from a flock of birds.
Here is my attempt. I chose a very different crop. I also did selective sharpening on the bird and extra denoising of the background. There are white spots in the image, which are not fixed by the hot pixels module. I would feel compelled to use the retouch module or GIMP to remove these distractions even if they where really in the original scene. But I have not done that here because of the effort it would take.
please assign a license to the file. as this is basically a play raw, you should follow the rules for one.
I’m also using a 6x7 crop, which is almost square. I like that framing, it makes it more “peaceful” and less digital. 
BTW, looking back, I think that I should have rotated the lake/pond banks to straighten the image.
Thanks
