@assaft One thing to know about LR is that its default settings don’t equal to unprocessed, so the screenshots of sliders aren’t as helpful for our reference as you may assume. E.g., it looks like some tone mapping and sharpening has already been applied.
Not a problem, but it means that, with FLOSS apps like PhotoFlow, you might need to take several more steps to get where you want.
Hi! I’d be very happy to try some edits on your image, to show what is actually possible to achieve with photoflow.
Since I understand you want to hide part of the people in the picture, I propose a semi-raw edit: you provide a 16-bit TIFF file with a minimal processing (basically a raw file with demosaicing applied), you blur what should be hidden, and then you post the image. With such a file it will still be possible to apply global and local WB and to recover shadows/highlights details.
Here is how to obtain a “demosaiced RAW”:
You can either blur the image directly in PhF before exporting, or later in GIMP. If you open the image in GIMP, be careful to preserve the embedded ICC profile and not convert it to GIMP’s working colorspace!
I’d be glad to share it the way you described. And thanks for spending time showing the potential of pf.
PA271505_shared.tif (91.3 MB)
By the way, I think I didn’t say it clearly but I find the relight filter very impressive.
I tried it on another image, perhaps a harder one in terms of being more back-lit, and relight was excellent and dead simple to use. I’m sharing the RAW file below. In this case NR is even more needed, and also perspective correction (PC). I found it hard to apply these with pf. and I couldn’t get close to my LR processing of this image. I also wanted to ask about applying exposure compensation: I wasn’t sure where it’s best to do - in the RAW Developer layer or in a separate basic adjustments layer. It looks like the later - as I ended up with less highlights clipping, but I find this counter-intuitive.
PC063051.ORF (11.4 MB)
PC063051_1.pfi (24.6 KB)
PC063051_2.pfi (24.6 KB)
Lightroom version:
PF doesn’t clip until you export the file and it also depends on the file format. What you need to do is recover the highlights and saturation using the appropriate tools. What exposure compensation does is bring up the middle grey to an appropriate level; some tools work best when it is the in the right range.
What you need to do is recover the highlights and saturation using the appropriate tools
Can you tell me which tools?
I tried to put a basic adjustments layer with -1.5ev exposure compensation, and also a Highlights/Shadows layer with the highlights at -100. However, I still can’t recover the highlights that seem to be clipped by applying +2ev exposure compensation in the RAW Developer layer.
PC063051_1_more.pfi (24.6 KB)
The exposure compensation in the RAW developer does not introduce any clipping, and an opposite exposure applied later will restore the original image. here is a demonstration: PC063051_4.pfi (19.2 KB)
Here is the closest I could get to the LR output:
I will explain you the details later tomorrow, but you can already inspect the .pfi to see the set of tools I used…
There are a bit more halos in the clouds compared to LR, something we should still try to improve!
The exposure compensation in the RAW developer does not introduce any clipping, and an opposite exposure applied later will restore the original image. here is a demonstration
Thanks, I see your point. However, if I add a Relight filter between the RAW developer and the layer that restores the exposure level, I can’t recover the highlights. See here: PC063051_1_more_2.pfi (28.9 KB)
I ended up with this processing: PC063051_2_v3.pfi (35.8 KB)
I think it has more ‘pop’ than the LR’s development.
I like you development too. Could you explain why you went with the Shadows/Highlights + Tone mapping approach, instead of Relight?
