Any help and tips on how to deal with the the blue problem is appreciated. My approach was to keep things simple and only use filmic rgb, color balance rgb, tone equalizer and color calibration.
You are going probably a bit too far in saturation and cromacity. For me, this blue sky is also a bit too blue. And also some reds are a bit on the edge. But, of course, it’s just what you are trying to get, there is no good or bad way.
Just to keep your editiong, I’ve simply used another color calibration instance to stop down the blue channel colorfulness. That makes the trick for the blue oversaturation that you showed. But, of course, the sky gets less blue (more natural, and, to my taste better… but once again, that’s just my own taste).
If you just want to reduce this blue spot, you can use a drown mask, and limit the effect to it, and keep the intensity on the sky.
EDIT: I updated my picture and sidecar file, for I find it was more flat than yours, so I added some contrast to it.
EDIT2: Seeing the trees on the JPG you are trying to imitate, they are far more red. Probably it’s a question of white balance (or color calibration) also. It seems that the proportions are not the same, and that could the the culprit of the excessively saturated blue…
Thanks a lot. That is a nice edit. I agree 100% that the other edit was over the top. I guess I’m trying to understand how such an “over the top” edit in darktable is possible while keeping the blue refelction in the water nice. My camera does this without local edits, so I thought there must be a way. I’m just not understanding yet how so.
I was adding a new thought in my post while you were answering. I was thinking about the color calibration (or even white balance) that your camera applies for their JPG autogeneration. Probably that can be a point to study, and an explanation of how can be so saturated without oversaturating blues.
I reprocessed the image with my camera, this time the red is gone. I might have had the “color chrome” effect activated the first time, causing the reddish look. The blue reflection in the water is still OK in the camera’s JPG.
That looks really nice. I see you’re using two tone curves which seem to do a lot of the magic in you edit. How did you arrive at these two particular tone curves?
Edit: What do I need to do to use those DCP profiles?
Hmm. I see they come preinstalled with rawtherapee under /usr/share/rawtherapee/dcpprofiles, my camera is included there. It makes quite a noticeable difference to the image to switch them on and off. Didn’t know about these. Thanks!
I’m not sure if DT has something equivalent? Is color calibration doing something similar to some extent?
Don’t know too much about .dcp files (for they are not used in dt, which is the only program I’ve been using for raw files). But I guess is more or less the same idea of the video by Aurelien previously posted. But, that’s yet ready to use, most probably, which is comfortable, though Aurelien’s approach gives individualized control using your camera (that can be slightly different fro other similar ones) and even the objective, or exact light conditions.
Anyway, it seems that there is a way of using them in dt, converting them into ICC profiles:
Probably worth trying! I’ll do when I have some time for this, for one of my cameras is supported, and the other is not, but there are other similar that probaly can improve the results.
If you can, you can install Adobe DNG converter and it has DCP files for most cameras so you can use their version, you can also make dcp profiles with either xrite software if you have the card and software or if you can use dcamprof to make your own calibrated profiles…I think RT has some dcp profiles and some custom profiles that are based on DCP files depending on your camera. With DCP you have the option in color management to tweak parts of it by adding the tone curve or not, the base or look tables as well just to see how it goes…in RT thought the model used for the tone curve can really make a difference if you cycle through the options you will see what I mean…Also if you have the automatch on you will see it changes if you use the dcp profile and depending on whether you use its tone curve or not…
