This DNG is already demosaiced using Iridient X-Transformer, so basically you are right, it is more like a tiff.
The figure looks like St. George, but I don’t know if this is true.
btw your sharpening is extraordinary! Never saw so much details from this cheap lens
What a challenging file to process… Briefly, what I did (in RT) is:
Adjust the WB temperature and tint
Increase saturation of pastel tones a bit
Increase the contrast using curves
Activate the dehaze module
My aim was to differentiate the castle from the trees, with good colors but still retaining the impression of “distance”. I also decided to ignore the highlights in the roof, it’s very hard to keep them from clipping.
At this point the image is quite blue, so I used a pretty drastic RBG curve to get the blue channel under control.
After that, trying to give the image a bit of “atmosphere”, I used one of my favorite tricks: tone mapping with negative strength. After that, I just activated RL sharpening.
Demosaicing in RawTherapee is really good, but CA and distortion correction is done perfectly by Iridient. In the end it is only my laziness that let me buy Iridient, and to get even worse I deleted all my RAF files from before 2019
Nice image @Sunhillow! Here is RT 5.7 + GIMP 2.10.12 attempt. The GIMP was used to increase the contrast in the image (To increase the contrast, I used the Screen blend mode on the castle and Multiply blend mode for the forest.) DSCF3855_Iri.jpg.out.pp3 (12.6 KB)
I knew I was going to downscale the image so that the image in the server wouldn’t be so big, thus I decided to make the wavelets processing a bit more harder than usual. That way, after downscaling everything would be as it should.
The final image will be close (close, although not exactly the same) to what you see when looking at the image at 50% size in the preview area, but without the final sharpening: if you want to see a closer (but not yet the very same) preview in RT, then you will need to copy the Post-Resize Sharpening settings into the Sharpening tool. But don’t forget to set Sharpening off before exporting!!!
Moreover, if you want a final image without downscaling the raw resolution, then you will need to keep the Sharpening tool on, turn off the Resize tool, and tweak the wavelet levels settings to a more reasonable levels.
It all depends on what you expect to get in the end.
Ouch!
So let me say “when cropped to the nominal size of 4896 x 3264 distortion correction is perfect”
In this case cropping 6 pixels from upper and lower border would remove this.
True! I promise, my next PlayRaw contribution will be a real RAW file.
And I want to thank everyone who worked with this photo.
Basically there were two directions:
Natural colours: the castle is gray, the roof is dark gray and sunset was far away. Here I like age’s second edit the most
Warm colours: simply looks more pleasing to the eyes (my eyes). Here I like danny’s edit most
In this photo it is really hard to remove the blue tint, especially over the trees behind the castle.