Oh yes, that is true. I concentrated on the bird, and at first I was afraid that your highlights were blown. [Luckily they were not .]
If/When time permits: Using darktable, it would be an interesting exercise to use a parametric mask to lighten the surroundings a bit. OTOH in my try, above, the dark background gives more oomph to the bird…
Re darktable vs RawTherapee: I do like them both; so much that from time to time I have problems remembering whether feature x is in dt or RT… Ah well.
@martin.scharnke - You really managed to control those highlights well in your filmic version! I would have expected to lose detail in those feathers but they really did render lovely.
I thought that this is an ideal image for using GIMP + G’MIC, due to requirement of local manipulations. Applied Freaky Details to bird (some percentage, not completely) and some percentage of Fuji Astia to the rest of the image and then curves for the global adjustments.
My attempt to darken the background and bring out the egret without blowing out the texture of the feathers.
As I become more familiar with darktable I would have liked to tone down the highlights on the log, in the background, and on of the foliage in the water.
Didn’t use filmic, will refrain from using it until I understand code. Phase one, in darktable reduce EV in blown out areas, increase details and contrast to recover from EV reduction. Highlights reconstruction since purple started creeping in. 2018-07-20_10-23-51.10_DSC2161.NEF.xmp (3.8 KB)
Export, open in GIMP, resize and use GMI’C. In new layer denoise, from original dynamic range increase to new layer. Picture above is denoised is set to luma lighten only (top layer to bring light to background), dynamic range (middle) is set to soft light and original is normal.
Fiddling with layers may produce result like this one
@martin.scharnke really a nice shot!
Since you tried DT’s filmic module on it, I will post an edit based on a similar filmic module I am developing for PhotoFlow. As the code is not committed yet, I cannot provide a .pfi file for now, but I will update the post as soon as my edits can be reproduced.
PhF’s filmic module is very much inspired by Blender’s filmic OCIO config, and uses a very similar tone mapping function. This is what I could quickly achieve, with some local contrast preservation on top of the filmic tone-mapping:
Wow … thanks to so many of you who have produced such great edits. I’m particularly grateful to seeing the steps you have taken. With the exception of some masking by shape, and some HighPass, I have not used masking much at all. Looks like I have plenty of avenues for practice!
The start was a very nice photograph. The bird sharp and separated from the background, just two tiny overexposed areas on it.
Summary of the edits I made:
I made the white balance much warmer, the original from the camera was too cold for my taste
Some denoising (profile), but with focus on the bigger areas to denoise the background.
Increased contrast on the bird’s neck and tail to bring out some details there
Darkened the background a bit with filmic
Highlights a little bit reduced
Cutted out the borders to bring the bird more into the image’s focus
The piece of wood in the background a bit darkened
My take with RawTherapee.
Many of you went for darker renditions, but I like it better colorful.
Usually I am a lurker … still I enjoy posting time to time
Minimal processing using PhotoFlow by itself with its filmic (OCIO) and color correction modules. Remember to change the path in the PFI: 2018-07-20_10-23-51.10_DSC2161.pfi (23.0 KB).