This question can be read in at least 2 ways. Glenn addressed one of them and if that was what you wanted to know you can stop reading
You might want to know how to add a sentence/paragraph you want to comment on to your reply. The way I just did and the way Glenn did twice in the previous post. If that is the case:
If you select the text you want to reply to using the mouse Quote will pop up. Click on that and the text selected, including user info will be pasted into the reply box. You can do multiple selects, are not limited to quoting one user and can also quote yourself.
Good put, and the only thing I feel compelled to add is to make sure you have selected the spot in your draft at which you want a quote to be inserted before you go back to the post from which to select the quote. The quote tool happily inserts the quote wherever your cursor is positioned, even in the middle of your well-crafted missive…
Well done to get the foliage just visible, but the dark blue sky is not right. It was moonless at midnight and the only illumination would be possible sparkles of aurora most likely greenish shaded.
That looks pretty good, but a couple of questions.
I notice you didn’t use the color calibration module, but just set the white balance module to “as shot” - is this just personal preference? In practice it didnt make much difference for this image, but color calibration gives a temperature 400K lower.
Regarding filmic - it looks like you chose White Relative exposure of 4EV, was that a personal choice? as pushing up to 6EV does reveal more of the fainter aurora
And lastly, I like the way you used the tone equalizer to darken the background night sky, and increase the contrast.
A technical note on the darktable 3.6 capabilities. The overexposed area in the lower-left could probably be saved to a useable degree with some better highlight reconstruction tools. It is a smooth gradient and only the green color channel is clipping. A possible caveat is if there is if the ionized color is not picked up at all by either the blue or red pixels and that they, therefore, don’t correlate with the green channel.
No cloning or healing was done during the massacre of this RAW file
Seriously though; This was an amazingly easy edit to do in RawTherapee:
Exposure (tad of negative exposure, bit of highlight compression, slight film-like curve),
Shadows/Highlight (highlights only),
L*a*b Adjustments (L channel, very slight negative curve),
White balance (just a tad warmer),
Softlight (default setting)
I did go wild with the noise reduction: I separately adjusted the blacks (darks), greens and purples. All done with Local Adjustments and 3 times the Blur/Grain & Denoise tool. Why? Because I could…
To be quite honest, I don’t really dig too deeply into the modules; I mostly just fiddle with the sliders till I see something I like. To answer your questions:
Colour Calibration: The reason I didn’t use the colour calibration module is because I don’t really understand it! I didn’t change the white balance because the colours looked appropriate to me based on past viewings of northern lights.
Filmic: Definitely personal choice. I found that when more of the fainter aurora was visible, it reduced the dramatic contrast of the image. But I just popped back in to check out +6 and, well, it looks good too!
hmm seen them several times here in Finland - but how cool or warm they look varies IMG_4091.CR2.xmp (16.1 KB)
an older one of mine - not great, just from back garden but an idea of the greens
