How would you manage the midtones and highlights in this image please?
The starting point is the standard film curve bundled profile.
The highlights look ok at this point. There is some luminance clipping but not much however the midtones are too dark.
Option 1
Use exposure compensation to bring up the midtones.
If I add +1EV the midtones look good but the sky looks awful.
I tried to manage the highlights via the tone equaliser but they don’t look right.
Option 2
Ignore exposure compensation, use the shadows and midtones of tone equaliser to bring up the midtones.
To me this gives the better result however I feel I’m not following the generally recommended steps when post processing images. But does this matter if I like the end result…
Option 3
Use Tone curve 2 to manage the highlights. This looked awful but then again I lack experience with tone curves.
Attached is the RAW plus the .arp file with snapshots for options 1 and 2 above.
Hi,
the picture is much too bright for my taste / usual viewing conditions, so I’m not sure what exactly you are after. However, I tried… I started from your first snapshot and tuned the tone equaliser more to my taste. What I did was to use the “pivot” slider to decide the tonal range that each of the equaliser “band” sliders are going to affect, and then worked on the sky with the highlights and whites. (The best way to visualise what “pivot” does is to turn on “show tonal map” and then move the slider and see what changes).
Hope this helps, here is your sidecar with an extra snapshot showing my settings. IMG_9967.CR2.arp (45.3 KB)
However, I also have a question:
what general recommended settings are you talking about? There are no general recommended settings. There might be easier or harder ways to achieve what you want, but those depend on what it is that you want…
On reflection I agree. I spent too much time messing around with the various settings.
Thank you for the explanation about the pivot. Using the tonal map definitely helps me understand this more.
I phrased my point very badly.
Certainly in darktable and from a PDF I read about using RawTherapee (Question on simple work flow in Rawtherapee - #5 by Wayne_Sutton) , the general recommendation is to push exposure to get the midtones correct then deal with any blown out highlights. I seemed to be ignoring this in option 2 so I was wondering how others would have dealt with this.
Ah, I see. No, art doesn’t recommend anything, you are free to use it in whatever way works for you and your goals
Jokes aside, in your example controlling the brightness with the exposure slider or with the tone equaliser does the exact same thing to individual pixels. The only difference is that exposure is applied uniformly to all pixels, whereas the tone equaliser lets you apply different gains to different tonal “zones”. So which one to use is mostly a matter of convenience.
Thanks for your comments! I think it would add to the thread if you were a bit more specific about what exactly are the interesting parts of your approach in the context of this conversation. There is a lot of info packed in your reply that one might consider as interesting, such as different software used, an indication of the time spent in editing, an indication of the output result the op showed, and a quick description of the steps/individual tools used. So, can you please elaborate?
Just to clarify, I only tweaked the tone equaliser starting from @Phil_Smith’s arp, to reply to the specific question asked in the op. I didn’t do anything else to the picture, as this would simply add confusion IMHO – I think the play raw category is the proper place to ask for more extensive edits.
I think I wasn’t clear, sorry. I tried to express my concerns in an indirect way, but I probably failed, so I’ll try again with a more direct reply. I think you are hijacking the thread, which was about one specific question about one specific software, and did not even contain pictures, to turn it into a visual battle of editors. I have no problem whatsoever with that if that’s what you want, but can you please move this to its own thread (and I would suggest) in the more general play raw category?
Hi,
There is no need to over-apologise in this way, but I’m sure you know that.
I suggest you (re-)read the FAQ, in particular the “improve the discussion” and “keep it tidy” sections, that explain my point of view quite well.
Best regards
It would be wonderful for those of us aspiring to leverage ART to its fullest if there were ART-oriented “Play Raw” threads with *.arp sidecars over there.
I’ve tried to replicate some of the RAW edit examples I’ve found most appealing using ART and often get tripped up given my still-limited grasp of nuances between certain RT/DT and ART tools.
Having studied the “differences” section (ART blog entries), hands-on experience in replicating “Play RAW” examples via .arp sidecars would seem like a productive next step.
Hi,
I agree it would be nice. I think the best way to make this happen is to ask explicitly for art versions in the specific play raw threads – that’s what play raws are for indeed!
In keeping with the spirit of the original post I downloaded and processed the image in ART. I found the process very simple and straight forward due to the nice GUI of the program. I apologise that I am unsure how to create the arp file to share my edits. But my process was very simple.
I left the exposure compensation alone because that just bleached away the sky.
I lifted the shadows by +53
I reduced the highlights by -100 because I prefer the more dramatic sky
I then lifted the midtones by +13
I increased the contrast to +19
I did not worry about any other edits such as sharpness, saturation or anything else because you only asked about midtones and highlights.
I would add that my philosophy to digital images in the camera and in the processing is to take care of the highlights first because if they are blown we have huge problems. Shadows are usually easier to recover. With some images (not this one) I might set the highlights slider to -100 and then do further darkening of the highlights using the exposure compensation slider. I then would recover the shadows using the shadows slider. I hope that makes sense. This is similar to your option 2 approach and is definitely the approach I would take.
One when you start to edit a photo and this will be in the same folder as your photo.
The other is a out.arp file and is created when you export a photo.
I ran ART with a default options file rather than my custom preferences. When I exported an image it created a “converted” folder where my image originally was and in this folder was the exported jpeg and out.arp file.
These are the defaults in preferences / image processing :
This was the one I could see and the timestamp made it obvious that the edits were not included. Is it possible to create a sidecar file when editing but not exporting? Maybe @agriggio Alberto could answer this? Thanks
Yes, indeed. Sidecars are made along the way, pretty much automatically as you edit - whether or not you “export” or “save” the file for other purposes.
In Preferences you can have them stored either next to your RAW files (“sidecar” literally), in a separate cache folder (extra backup?) or both.
I think the arp is only updated when you move onto the next photo or close ART. The timestamp doesn’t look to be updated when in the middle of editing, however in preferences / image processing there is a tick box for autosaving the arp file. I think the default is 0, so disabled.
Thanks for the clarification. @Phil_Smith you are correct! If you do turn off autosave (with a “0” to disable) ART will save your sidecar when you exit the edit mode of that image as you’ve described. However, if you create (or delete) any “Snapshot” of your edits at any time, then ART will save the sidecar at that moment, regardless of your autosave option selection.
I’ve found that the snapshot feature is a real life saver and has bailed me out many times - including the occasional system crash where I’d have otherwise lost my efforts to that point.
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