There are some great sky edits here and it’s amazing what can be done with darktable these days but I’d urge a couple of notes of caution.
What is the subject of the image? The more contrast you add to the sky the more it becomes the focus of the image. If I’m taking a street image, I would be more likely to crop out the sky or keep it flat so it doesn’t become a distraction. If I’m taking a picture of the sky I would similarly crop out or darken the rest of the image.
There’s only so much dynamic range to play with. If you add contrast to the sky you usually either lose contrast elsewhere in the image or start to make it look unnatural. Particularly when the sky becomes almost as dark as the things that it’s illuminating, it begins looking wrong. Some of the better sky edits would leave the street scene in near-darkness if they were to keep a natural balance in the image (e.g. if they had been achieved just by reducing exposure).
For example, a very quick edit using just the exposure module and white relative exposure in filmic:
The question is what is a natural balance in the image. A photography works different to our eyes.
If you look at your quick example: It is daylight and i’m pretty sure the street and the building wouldn’t look so dark if you’d look at them in real life. So If you now decide to raise the exposure. You would lose the details in the sky and you would get a completely blown out, white sky.
You are maybe used to that if you are an old lad like me. Photos looked like that in the past, because the dynamic range of film wasn’t as good as nowadays the sensors.
But if you would stand in this street, you would of course see a bright street and at the same time all the structures in the sky, because your eye adapts to the brightness it is looking at.
The eye sees just a very small spot and it is wandering around, grabbing all the thing (while it is adapting to the light situation where it looks at).
In the end there is a picture in your head which was puzzled together by your brain. And I think most of the edits come nearer to this picture in your head, than teh pictures from the past, where you had to decide, if you want a blown sky or an underexposed scenery.
Are you sure, your monitor setting isn’t too bright?
For me your Image is way too dark. I can understand your position. But I hardly can recognize the door on your picture anymore. I can’t imagine, you exaggerated that much on intend.
Of course, a further possibility is to concentrate on the scene. But that has not much to do with recovering sky or not. That’s more a question of composition. On your pic the blown out and not really important sky was simply left out. But on the other hand, then it doesn’t matter, if you recover the sky or not.
Same edit as before, different crop. Leaving the sky out. I would probably raise exposure a little bit further. Anyway, I think it still works:
The image processing start before you press the buttons on the camera. If the sky is the important part, then compose to the sky and select the aperture/speed for the sky. If the scene is the important part, then expose to the scene and dont even take a picture of the sky. If you really want both, then you need to select a camera/lens that can handle both.
If you mask it to where you want it and pull back the opacity to suit the HDR preset in Local contrast is amazing… actually it seems to pull down highlights quite a bit which can be helpful… you just need to finesse it to suit the image…
I am close to the opinion of @elstoc in terms of editing. And yet I see, I pushed the street quite a lot but started from a very dark base point (EXP=0) and is still realistic dark IMHO and sky not over prominent…
So here is my take with current master (dev version)
This is so true. I feel you should expose for the highlights so they are not blown out and take care of the shadows later in processing. It is really a big ask of any editing program to faithfully recreate blown out highlights. The new inpaint opposed highlights recovery method does go a long way towards this. Recovering shadows is relatively easy, but the caveat is noise in those areas will be increased. Again DT tends to handle this well. With the denoise (profiled) module the preserve shadows slider is amazing with shadow noise.
In this image the lady carries an umbrella so maybe the overcast sky adds to the story of rain in the scene, but I would not want too much emphasis on the sky in this image.
The OP request was to address the sky and I think there were lots of good tips to be found in the edits provided. Then there is also the discussion around the real look in the scene. It may well have been dark and if that was the look someone wanted its fairly easy to achieve. For me though a dark rendition and the cluttered nature of this shot wouldn’t make it one I would want to keep unless it was of course recording a holiday moment or something…
Taking a quick look on line there were shots taken by other photographers from a similar spot and on a sunny day. For sure there is a lot of color there to be had and the sky was often blown…
In any case for me this is a really nice illustration of the power of having a raw image…you can get the dull one in pretty good form from the jpg but you can edit to reveal the colors that are there from the raw and also consider a different crop to focus on some aspect of the image… Wide open its pretty busy with no real main subject… but if you crop and bring it in a bit you can create a bit more of a directed view…
So maybe not realistic but for me adding the color may not be completely authentic for the day but to me it makes the image more appealing… just a random thought…
If the highlight is not totally blown, then I have an approach for this: stretching contrast in the highlight. Methods vary, but I use a combination of multiply mode contrast enhancement and local contrast. Depending on onset of clipping (slight magenta cast for example), if it is a dreary sky like this I’ll mildly desaturate as well (I did it in this case) using color calibration. Lastly to add a little detail I use a subtract mode watercolor blur using diffuse/sharpen module.
I shoot a lot of dawn/dusk time pictures, see a lot of this. I took your raw and developed it in my hack raw processor, gonna post a few screenshots to illustrate what I think.
First, here’s the raw just past demosaic, still energy-linear:
Note the histogram; the magenta is caused by white balance shifting the sensor saturation pileups. A lower camera exposure that would shrink or even eliminate the pileups is what should first be considered, but that pushes the darker parts further into darkness which has to be lifted a bit with a tone curve. But, that’s not the capture we have…
Next, add the nice RawTherapee highlight reconstruction:
Takes care of the vast majority of the pileups, but there’s still some “color” in the sky. So I ask, could this be the low-elevation sun illuminating the clouds? A lot of it sure looks like it…
Finally, I first added a bog-standard filmic, it just blew the sky to white in it’s default configuration. So, I replaced it with a control-point curve and shaped it to taste:
Not a lot of lift available without dorking up the rest of the tone distribution, but I think keeping the street scene dark complements the image. And, I’m not so un-enamored with the colored sky…
It was useful with blown sun images. And as @Donatzsky mentions it’s more about blending and managing transitions in areas with extreme highlights than reconstruction as people expect
