This reminds me of public school winter carnival where you got to take out the Tempera paint and throw it on the snow to make “art”…
I have to agree that neither filmic or sigmoid is really needed for this image. This is a rather colder version than I previously offered.
I’ll explain my thinking on this one. I show small JPEG versions for bandwidth reasons.
First, make a simple sRGB version, and chop off the right-hand black border:
%DCRAW% -v -w -6 -T -O x.tiff Trestles.RAF
set SRC=x.tiff
set SRC2=x2.tiff
%IMG7%magick ^
%SRC% ^
-bordercolor Black -border 1 -trim +repage ^
%SRC2%
I am happy with the overall lightness and contrast. If we want numbers: mean=0.678163, standard deviation=0.159367. Increasing mid-tone contrast would give more clarity in the distant trees, but at the expense of the dark wooden panels and light snow textures.
To make a prettier image, we can increase local detail and chroma. Local detail is by extrapolation from a blur, where the blur is a simple guided filter using integral images with a 100x100 pixel window, and factor 4 subsampling for speed. (See Guided filter.)
set BASE=blr.tiff
call %PICTBAT%guideFilt %SRC2% . %BASE% simple integ 100x100 . 4
set mult=2
%IMG7%magick ^
%SRC2% %BASE% ^
-poly %mult%,1,%%[fx:1-(%mult%)],1 ^
+write out.miff ^
-colorspace HCL ^
-channel 1 -evaluate Multiply 3.0 +channel ^
-colorspace sRGB ^
out2.miff
The result with increased local detail is:
The result also with a massive increase of chroma, a factor of 3, is:
I think this image is clearer and prettier than the first image I showed. And I don’t like it, for those reasons. For me, this image in its “unpretty” form captures a cold bleakness that seems appropriate, a scene that fades into a background of featureless gray.