There is an old oak by the south-eastern entrance to the Söderåsen National Park. Rumor has it that this is the oak under which Gandalf sat as he smoked his pipe and penned the famous saga about J.R.R. Tolkien. I don’t know about that, but the valley rabbits sure love it.
I walked by that area many times, and the peaceful beauty of the tree often caught my eye, but I never found the right light for capturing it. Well I was there again today, with the dog, in the summer showers, and it looked just right. Went back home to get my gear, the dog just managed to jump on the couch but back out into the rain it was. Dog wasn’t too happy. The midges were thrilled, though.
I shot it at 50mm f/2.8 just to get the fore- and backgrounds a bit fuzzy, using a circular polarizing filter to remove the shine from the leaves. I took two more shots: one of a color target, and the other a flat-field. Not because I thought it needed either of them, but because I was just curious whether the color profile would make a difference considering it was in the forest, raining, and I was using a polarizing filter, and because @heckflosse asked me to test flat-field code speedups in RawTherapee.
I created a DCP using Anders’ DCamProf. I opened the raw in RawTherapee, made sure I was using my monitor’s color profile, applied the Neutral processing profile, applied the custom DCP, and observed barely a difference. Oh well, 100€ well spent.
No, I joke, it does come in useful, just not in this case. Moving on.
My starting point is a very correct image - the colors are correct, the white balance is correct, the flat-field correction removed vignetting, and everything is just correct, but not aesthetically pleasing. So.
Both tone curves set to “perceptual”, the first one bumped up more in the top-right, the second one bumped down more in the bottom-left. That takes care of interesting tones.
Now colors. I discovered a new trick recently - in Lab* Adjustments, bump the CL curve (chromaticity according to luminance) up, and compensate for this by bumping the CC curve (chromaticity according to chromaticity) down. The effect is difficult to describe - the chromaticity of the image is largely the same (you can control this using the CC curve), but some elements pop more than others in a pleasing way. Pleasing me at least.
The hues are correct, but they need a little touch-up to look better on a computer screen. I want to note that it is important that your white balance is correct. Don’t color-tone your image using the white balance, because certain tools depend on a correct white balance to function correctly. Use the white balance tool for setting a correct white balance, and use the plethora of color tools to tone the colors. HH curve (hue according to hue), I dragged the orange and green tones down a bit to warm the greens up and separate them from the tree bark.
That’s it, mostly done. Now for a little final touches and magic.
Wavelets, 9 levels, I bumped up the highlights of the residual image to make the brighter areas shine. Forests tend to have too much fine detail when viewed on a screen because of all the leaves, so I used the Final Touchup panel’s Final Local Contrast curve to reduce the below- and above-average local contrast, while keeping the average local contrast as-is.
The leaves at the bottom of the photo were illuminated too much, they conflicted with the subject - the tree - so I used a graduated filter to dim them down. I also used a soft vignetting filter to darken the periphery, just a little. See? I told you the flat-field wasn’t necessary in this image.
Lastly, I downscaled the image to a 1920x1080 bounding box using the post-resize sharpening tool to compensate for the softening which downscaling causes.
Saved.
Watermark image made in Inkscape, scaled down and applied in GIMP.
Save.
Done.
If you want to follow along, here’s a raw photo of the same tree composed to show the other side, the flat-field, the color target shot + DCP, and a PP3 file (CC-BY-SA):
2016-06-16 oak 02.arw.pp3 (10.6 KB)
Old Oak - A Tutorial (75.7 MB)
If you load the PP3 make sure that it finds the flat-field and the DCP - the image settings depend on them.
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