This photo is an example of how I get natural, rich colors out of a digital workflow.
My first step is to always shoot in daylight white balance (actually, cloudy on my GR which defaults to cooler than I prefer), because auto white balance always murders colors in mostly-one-color scenes like this; it would bias everything towards magenta.
Next, I used macro mode on my GR (a fixed 28mm-equivalent APS-C compact) wide open to give a sharply delineated focus plane gently rolling off into softness in the background,
The next step is: Filmulator, my photo editor. I imported it, enqueued it, and loaded it up in the Filmulation tab for processing. There, I looked at the pre-filmulation histogram (the upper of the two small histograms), saw that there was no harsh clipping, and applied no exposure compensation nor highlight recovery. Nor did I tweak the white balance; it turned out just as I wanted to evoke warm morning sunshine on young dew-covered grass.
Then, I raised the drama to 85 to attenuate the brightness and enhance the saturation of the bright green values to a moderately strong degree, and lowered the white clipping point to the very edge of the post-Filmulator histogram to brighten the overall image.
Very interesting! The result is indeed really good. Would you agree to share the original RAW file? I would like to play with it using some more “classical” approach, to see by how much it could come close to filmulator’s version?
Because I’m always dissatisfied with other editors’ initial results, I can never get enough practice with them (especially Darktable), so it’s hard for me to make fair comparisons without another person trying their best on the same file.
(It’d be interesting to see what you can do in 15 seconds of editing, though, as well as what you can do given unlimited time)
Very nice. Is that trying to match my rendition, or is it what you would do with the image?
By any chance could you post a higher resolution version, or at least one that’s not chroma subsampled? It’s difficult to compare the subtleties in color in areas of fine detail near the focal plane.
My general impressions: It’s more saturated in the greens, and less saturated in other ways.
Relative to your output, Filmulator boosted the local contrast (visible just left of center in the focal plane, and in the bottom left with the dirt), darkened the bright background (keeping it from shifting slightly yellow as it did in RT), and lifted and warmed the shadows.
Is that trying to match my rendition, or is it what you would do with the image?
About 50/50 with as little effort as possible. I removed the vignetting because yours didn’t have any and then bumped up the shadows both because they were lighter in yours and because dark shadows on this image just didn’t look the best. If I were developing this for myself I would have made the grass more green (i.e. not more saturated, but make the hue more green) using the a* curve but I decided not to, to match yours better.
I often start with one of the Pop profiles when working on non-portraits, or with Skintones - Natural for portraits, or with a PP3 I tailored specific to my camera and lens to give a good neutral starting point, and then the image tells me what to do.
