I would like to develop a nice Darktable workflow for masking and then darkening skies which are overexposed relative to the main content.
An example I find difficult is shown here. The composition is unremarkable, it was chosen to highlight the issue (the lens has some CA, and the leaves are difficult to separate). What would you use?
Just to emphasize, I am primarily looking for masking solutions, and then an exposure correction. I find the tone equalizer tricky to use in this context, but if you prefer that it is fine too.
I’m no expert at this, but maybe it’s a little more dramatic. dt 4.6.1. I didn’t try to do a full edit, I just played with the tones in the sky, mostly with ColorBalanceRGB.
I’m afraid you’re going to have a hard time; without any masking and exposure manipulation, the CA around the leaves is so strong, that with corrections it creates an effect which resembles ‘ringing’. At least I think it’s CA.
Uncorrected:
Very hard because of the high contrast between the sky and the leaves + strong CA at the interface
I tried to stick to your conditions and only used a masked exposure instance with a basic pipeline,
I think if I reduce the exposure further in the highlight too many artifacts start to appear
I think that is why the tone eq works much better… use the exposure compensation to move the mask to give you lots of room in the highlights and then just drag down from the right most node… its usually the best results… as for the CA if the raw CA correction, the CA module or lens correction still cant master it…you can use CC module gray tab…set on blue and masked with the details slider then reduce the opacity slowly…you can often fade that in … I can’t take a run at demonstrating this until later when I have access to DT but it should be possible maybe even try the colorfulness and drop the blue or blue/red with a details mask on those edges…
I think the main problem is, that there are parts of the sky which are burned out. Darkening the sky is leading to an emphasis of these parts. The CAs doesn’t make it easy, but are in my eyes less a problem, if you are willing to accept them. They are in the end already in the original RAW.
With all that dynamic range and blown areas in the sky personally I think the tone eq with its mask and curve will work much nicer than a masked instance of exposure applying the same correction to all pixels… in this case I often use rgb sum for the mask and I check the old guided filter as it sometimes can provide a bit more punch…
Hi, not a Darktable user but, I’d like to suggest approaching this a bit differently. Instead of trying to darken the sky with a complicated mask, you might find it a lot easier to avoid the inevitable artifact issues by initially adjusting the image for the sky, and then bringing everything else up to where is needs to be. A much softer and less precise mask can be used to selectively bring up the general brightness around the sky without suffering too many unintended consequences. I know non-freeware is generally verboten (feel free to delete the image if there’s a problem with it), but here’s about a minute in Lightroom using the simple methodology above. it would look a whole lot better if the sky wasn’t significantly blown in the RAW file…
Here is my second stab at it. Have managed to reduce the artefacts and yet managed to darken the sky. Essentially played with the exposure and the localised brilliance. Having said that, reducing the artefacts around the leaves, completely seems to be a VERY tall order
