Making snow in the shadows stand out

Having a hard time replicating the filter feature, i.e. changing settings only on part of a scene in this pic. There is a blue haze in the mountains which I have partially been able to offset using the dehaze feature, but I think it would be more efficient if I could somehow use a feature similar to creating another layer to just edit the mountains. The issue here was that the morning light was coming at such a angle much of the snow was behind the shadows which created the blue haziness in that area to begin with.

Any post processing ideas are welcome that don’t blow away the sky or highlights.
IMG_5339.CR2 (29.7 MB)

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

Hi, and welcome to pixls.

One approach would be using the Local Adjustments functionality. This is a tool that can work locally, based on masks.

For example, with these to spots:

You can go from this:

To this:

The above is an example, you do need to spend some time on the overall image, but this does demonstrate how this works on a specific area.

You can also target the sky using this tool, but you can also use the Colour Toning module, especially the Colour correction regions method, which can also create masks to target specific areas.

EDIT Full edit + sidecar:


shadows.stand.out.cr2.pp3 (25.7 KB) RawTherapee 5.8 Development

welcome to the forum.

do you mean like this?


IMG_5339.CR2.jpg.out.pp3 (18,0 KB)

i tweaked a little bit with local adjustments in RT dev3075

2 Likes

@marter

Did you upload the correct sidecar? I’m not able to use it and if I look inside everything is turned off (except the bare basics that are always on).

My version…

Darktable 3.9.0~git24.477bc5c41a-1

IMG_5339.CR2.xmp (61.1 KB)

My version with ART. Use of some masks

@Jade_NL , youre right, thanks! the file is exchanged in my post above.

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A little bit a of dehaze and a local adjustment on the mountain with a bunch of tools to increase contrast, cut the blues and increase colors :


IMG_5339.CR2.pp3 (24.5 KB)


IMG_5339.CR2.xmp (27.5 KB)

IMG_5339_01.CR2.xmp (17.6 KB)

1 Like

@sls141 Too crunchy for my taste but the snow is definitely standing out. :+1:

Love this. You definitely answered the question there, the snow is for sure standing out. Illustrates to me what else happens to the image given the contrast, lighting challenges etc. (and yes, I think if I wanted to make it stand out this clearly, B&W photo is a pretty descent idea)

Yes, this looks better. The snow certainly stands out in the sunny aspects of the mountain and the sky and rest of the image still looks reasonable. Thanks, I presume this local adjustments you tried is unique to the RT dev version?

@goflydeep yes, the local adjustments are part of the dev, here you can find the latest version:

My play in GIMP. I tried to make the snow stand out, but I didn’t wish to eliminate the haze completely as I feel it creates the impression of depth.