Perseverence furthers

Processing
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I’m a Darktable beginner, only recently starting to use Darktable–in place of RawTherapee. I’m finding Darktable to be an order of magnitude harder to use. But I’m getting there.

Darktable is also and order of magnitude more powerful because of A) a larger tool list and most important B) masking tools.

For several days I’ve been working on the same image with both softwares. This is the first one where my efforts with Darktable were transparently (paramentrically?) better than With RawTherapee.

A threshold has been crossed.

dtPIC_7454_Stilt-poke
dtPIC_7454_Stilt-poke4946×3278 4.85 MB

fwiw my workflow with RawTherapee has been to fiddle with the same raw multiple times in order to send two or three exposures to Gimp, where I would do masking and layering with Gimp. The various combinations of parametric masks, drawn masks, inverting and blurring of masks in Darktable are far more powerful.

I’m sold. This is a youing Black-necked Stilt by the way. September 3, 2018 Southwest Montana.

2 Likes
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Nice shot, clear colors, sharp and good contrast.

Maybe you can try denoising the water a bit more, you could try a mask around the stilt. And in the white feathers there is some chromatic noise.
The profiled denoise module has a preset to remove chroma noise btw.

Edit: the bright area looks a bit overexposed. Did you try the shadow/highlight module and highlight reconstruction (other option than ‘clip highlights’)?

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Will do. Yes the shoulder IS over-exposed. I used a mask with the exposure module only, pulling the slider down until the over exposed area became an ugly gray. And then backed off.

I’ll now work with your suggestions.