Notice that it already has significantly brighter shadows, but I want better. So I told Filmulator to correct chromatic aberration, then I turned Drama to 100 to pull down the highlights.
And there we have it. Two sliders and a switch, about 15 seconds of work, and we have a pleasing output. (It’s not the best photo but it’s a great demonstration.)
The result doesn’t quite convince me to be honest. It looks flat and the clouds look very painted (because of haloing I reckon). I did a quick edit in GIMP to see how it would look if processed differently:
I essentially masked of the dark parts using a luminosity mask and brought them back up using curves.
I think the landscape has a bit more of a 3D effect this way, plus the clouds still look natural. But that’s all subjective of course.
Edit: At a second glance, I completely overdid the sharpening, ignore that.
How large are you viewing it? The halos become unnoticeable if you view it larger, like from one image diagonal away. It depends on the film area I set, as shown in my more recent post.
[quote=“CarVac, post:6, topic:347, full:true”]
Also, my personal feeling is that the plants in the shadows of your rendition are rather more intensely green than what I remember from the scene.
[/quote]Used my default darktable preset to convert it to tiff for use in gimp. That has a little bit of velvia (saturation increase in the mid tones) in it.
The version with the smaller film area does look like it has some more depth to me. The effect on the clouds is still there though.
I am not sure if “tone mapping” is the right name for this (well, technically it is, but in general it is mostly used to describe ways to turn HDR into LDR images). Nevertheless, I gave it a quick try in darktable:
I find interesting the difference between the ‘haloless’ tone mapping you performed and Filmulator; your rendition hides the dramatic brightness difference between the shoreline and the adjacent water in the bottom-right, but has greater overall local contrast elsewhere.
I also did some experimenting with the Irish coast image, mostly to learn how to use the bilateral filter for generating halo-less luminosity masks.
In my case, I blended two versions of the same RAW file, one at nominal exposure and one with +2.5ev compensation, using a bilateral-based luminosity mask.
Then I applied some S-shaped RGB curve and some slight HiRaLoAm local contrast enhancement to the blended image, mostly to enhance the overall contrast.
The whole procedure is definitely more complex than tweaking a couple of sliders
I did see Fungie. We walked out towards the tip of the coast there, and back, and at about the same spot where I took this picture, we spotted Fungie performing for some boats.
Did you see Fungie?
