I’ve been struggling with this one. Lots of low-contrast subtlety that I’m trying to tweak without losing the feel. I’d love to see what folks can do with it:
Very nice. I often see this transition in the sky, from blue to yellowish, but most of the time I fail to preserve it when I process the image. Also, nice work preserving the shadows cast by the mountains.
My attempt. Thanks for sharing this great photo! I’m struggling with the sky; I think I’ve overdone the yellow, and introduced a halo at the top of the dark foreground. My lunch break is over, however. I may take another stab at it in the evening.
It is a great scene with many small details to lose oneself, and properly rendered you can feel the massive presence of the mountain range. I also don’t have the slightest idea on how to artistically approach it. The next best thing is bikeshedding, so I was having less Mars, less subject-rock stage-lighting, not too plush greens, some presence of the colors in the sky but not too much, and some but not too much presence of the rays of light in the haze.
I switched from AgX to filmic, because I had an easier time to allow for the slight tint of the sky to come through using filmic. The sky’s colors needed to be subdued - they clash with the red of the rocks, but rotating the colors around to fit didn’t do what I wanted either. Trying to improve the presence of the mountain face I had tried a few things, learned that working with rgb primaries or color calibration is powerful, and that the dehaze module is well behaved when used within reason (and very badly behaved otherwise). Still, all ideas I could come up with would have been very involved, with many instances focused via parametric masks for each part of the mountain range to have distinct settings for each distance - and that is too cumbersome for current times as well as for the time I currently have.
I settled.
After having the first version of “boring”, I learned a bit from the previous submissions which improved the presence of the mountains or improved the haze. And decided that a little bit of local contrast was the best I could do.
One editing challenge here was that my tiny little mini PC is GPU-less and cannot use OpenCL for anything without crashing. So, after trying my own patience, I accepted my fate, and the edit as it was.
P.S.: I might be doing Play Raw’s wrong. I can keep my diary entries in my own notes if they are bad style here.
My lunch break is over, however. I may take another stab at it in the evening.
