Hey everyone. Long time, no see! I did a little photo experiment the other night, and would like to see what you do with this.
The picture was taken on the beach after sunset. I set up a strobe light to light the model, then did a timed exposure while spinning the camera to create the pink and blue swirls behind and around her.
In RawTherapee, I wanted the color from the sky to be more saturated, and did a decent job using the CL and CC adjustments. But then her skin got way too saturated. So I wound up outputting two different TIFF files, one with the LAB adjustments turned on, and one with the LAB adjustments off. Then I put them into the Gimp as layers, and masked out the woman’s skin. My result:
To counteract the tone curves I used specific desaturation of reds in “color zones”. I also used “haze removel” to increase color contrast, where a masked out the woman.
Photoflow.
This is just about the craziest most complicated thing I’ve ever tried doing with Photoflow. The model’s skin is masked using a combination of curves, guided filters and where everything else failed, a few hand drawn masks to get rid of particularly nasty orange stripes. Once the masking was done the actual colour adjustments are relatively easy.
Good idea on the haze removal. I did not try that, but I will now!. Since I use RT and don’t know how to use DT, we have pretty coarse masking options available to us, and only in the color tab.
RT does have a pretty good haze remover tool, though. I will see what it does. Thanks again for sharing your process.