This is a very sharp street shot which, as a result, looks flat to the eye, unlike the classic landscape with distant features less saturated, less sharp and with less contrast. I am looking for various ways and means of applying an Impression of Depth to this kind of scene. Any way is of interest … masking, depth mapping, messing with DOF, fancy selections, etc.
The impression of depth should come from the subject, you can’t do too much about that in post. A person at the back on the path could help, for example.
Hi Cedric, the X3F file defeated me in DT and while I could process it in Affinity and RawTherapee I didn’t feel like doing a crash course in either of those programs to edit this image so I stuck with the tif file and used my beloved DT. I wonder which program you choose to use for X3F files?
There wasn’t a lot I could do with this scene, but I attempted a vignette to make the road lighter than the rest of the image to drag the viewer’s eye into that part of the scene. I used a parametric mask to exclude the sky from the vignette effect. Some images this technique works nicely on, but I am not really happy with this edit.
Ansel Adams relit his landscapes with a lot of dodging and burning in the darkroom and that is where I get inspired to use similar techniques with DT. SDIM0868 HS.tif.xmp (6.9 KB)
I use Sigma Photo Pro (SPP) for X3F files - minimum adjustments, just for conversion and preset WB really. Then I export as 16-bit TIFF ProPhoto color space, usually to the GIMP.
Anything other than SPP can miss a lot of the Foveon secret sauce buried in the X3F metadata.
Here’s a version in ART. I didn’t even look at things like composition, cropping, etc., since you asked about depth. ART didn’t read any metadata so who knows if the output was correct.
