There are two aspects of this scene that, in my opinion, make the photo pale:
The illumination is very diffuse and even. Diffuse light is actually very good for portraits because you don’t have harsh shadows, but if it’s too even (without soft shadows), it lacks the necessary depth.
The color of the light and the walls (with corresponding diffuse reflections) is very similar to the color of the skin, which also makes it difficult to separate people from the background.
The task here is to make this separation afterwards.
By white balancing I first got the color separation between people and background. Then I lightened the skin color a bit. Contrasts increased and with the help of channel mixer and color balance rgb tried to imitate the original color mood of the room.
I decided to try a different approach to give this photo more punch. RAW extracted using Filmulator (+1EV). In GIMP I used my saturation_h_m_l.py plug-in (as mentioned in the thread on vibrance) to boost the areas of medium saturation - particularly flesh-tones.
You are far more analytical… I cheated… I took a guess the floor might be grey and include any color cast. WB on an average of the floor…the dog looked pretty good and the skin tones seemed okay so I went with it
Ya nothing beats experience…here I might try to cheat again on the desktops just to see where it lands or work to a pleasing skin tone…I often find just fixing or getting a good skin tone yields a nice overall wb for the whole image… but again I am a rank amateur…
“In my job as an event photographer, I struggle with such lighting conditions very often:”
From my professional photography experience I would suggest you can save a lot of grief by getting a photographic grey card or a color checker card and taking a photograph with that under the lighting conditions you are working under. Takes but a moment to do. Then this would let you workout the white balance correctly for the development of the whole shoot which you could save as a preset or style in DT.
Here I have exported my DT edit and opened the resulting Tiff file in GIMP. I then selected auto levels adjustment in GIMP. It has really picked up the picture in my view.
I do a lot of photo restoration and I find GIMP auto levels so much more pleasing than auto levels in DT.
@priort when I look at the histogram for levels in DT it stretches all the way from left to right, but in GIMP there is space on the left and right of the histogram. Auto levels in GIMP raises the contrast and does a color balance by stretching each channel across the histogram. Often this produces a very pleasing result. Sometimes the contrast is a little high so I tweak the output levels to control this.
Compared to GIMP, DT’s auto levels are not as helpful for me.
This is a color space thing…in DT your working in the working profile…you have exported in srgb…so then GIMP gets it as srgb and can boost it…
Do the same thing in DT…import your tiff…now you will see the working profile in DT is likely still Rec2020…change that to srgb to match GIMP now try auto levels…nice and bright like you see with GIMP…
@priort Thanks for your suggestion. However, it didn’t replicate the GIMP result when I tried it. It did give a different result but not as pleasing for me as the GIMP result. Of course this is always subjective what we find pleasing. BTW, I exported my DT edit as a 16 bitt Tiff in Adobe RGB colour space not sRGB.
All good. GIMP also will use linear light or perceptual log and I think the autolevels gives you a different result for each there but this too may be able to be replicated by DT and might explain some of the difference you see between the two…