@afre - thanks for the comment, I’ll certainly try to expand.
Two things I thought I wanted to do with the picture, inspired by the sometimes “mystical” aura suggested by Japan in general, and also the fact I can sort of see a “witchdoctor” in the monkey’s rear end. So I wanted to make the monkey “pop” a little and then try to both emphasise the mist rising from the pool and use that to detract from the background… I thought black and white best suited what I was trying to achieve
Gave me a chance to start learning darktable and use some masks. Overall my workflow was very much on the hoof, and could certainly be refined.
I started by boosting the exposure in all three channels using the histogram and white balance. Overall I’m roughly 1.4EV up on the original. Channel mixer user to convert to monochrome, with bias to the green channel. Shortened L using a tone curve (flattened at the top) (Still learning what these things do, let alone what they mean, so really just playing until it looked right for me!)
Used a gradient mask to then reduce the exposure in the background, with a slight boost to black point.
Then a rotated gradient mask following the line of the stones in the foreground where the exposure, blackpoint and opacity of the mask are reduced.
Quite a tight drawn mask around the monkey itself, blurred significantly and reduced opacity. Increased the blackpoint a little.
Using the soften mode, reversed the existing monkey mask, and softened the remainder of the image (excluding the monkey), hopefully making the monkey stand out a little, and yet give the image a little “mystical” glow.
Finally a small amount of sharpening.
Not sure if I did all the steps in any kind of “correct” order, or indeed if any cancel each other out, but that’s learning. Good to use someone else’s image and see what you can do with it. So thanks to @jinxos for the opportunity.
Apologies if above is a bit of a ramble!