White-balance was a bit tricky. First I thought about using the white surface of the boat, but from which area? The cabin in the shadow or the side towards the water, which is probably illuminated by reflections from water, sky and street lighting? At the end I used the whole picture as area for the color picker in color calibration, and used the 4 ways tab in color balance rgb to compensate the color cast for different luminance levels.
I used tone equalizer to lift the shadows in the foreground, supported by a really low black relative exposure of -16 EV in filmic. This aims at giving the cabin a more “natural” visual experience, while the pier should remain just noticeable in the dark shadow.
Color grading is finalized again in the master tab of color balance rgb, by increasing global contrast and vibrance, and increasing linear chroma in highlights and a bit of brilliance in the midtones.
To increase the detail sharpness I use my preset in contrast equalizer, and added local contrast with a parametric mask on Jz input range to exclude shadows and highlights. Custom settings in denoise (profiled), especially scattering, central pixel weight and preserve shadows, also help increasing the separation of objects (boat, ropes) vs. smooth areas (water, sky).
First of all: The edit info is stored inside the jpg, unless you disable it (you did not), so if people want to have a look at your edit steps they can load the jpeg as sidecar file.
About not being able to find the xmp files: Does dartable actually create them? There’s an option in the preferences that takes care of this:
preferences -> storage -> XMP -> write sidecar for each image
It should be ticked (it is by default if I’m not mistaken).
Trying to get a handle on color grading; wanted to make the color of the waterfront go with the blues. Threw a lot of modules at it until I got what I wanted. Perhaps not as efficient as could be.
Made my color calibration on the light bulb showing in the oval window on the boat.
and this was edited into the camera by the raw chose the profile of the fuji velvia, since the raw is from fuji. the white balance on the yellow lantern received a temperature of 2550 kelvin +10 towards magenta. then, having received a cold picture and knowing the temperature of incandescent lamps, I added 3200 Kelvin and got a temperature of 5750 Kelven +10 magenta. I lightened up to 2.5 exposure stops, the sky went into overexposure, I applied a gradient to the sky and made -2.5 in exposure. the result was an evenly exposed, relatively light shot.I think finding the correct white balance in this shot is difficult as there is nothing white in the field of view. So I went to the trick with an incandescent lamp to find the correct and ideal white balance on this composition.
I wanted to reedit this great play raw wtih darktable 3.8 and the new workflow.
This version is much lighter and somewhat softer than my first edit 2.5 years ago. Not only the software changes but also the taste .
Sorry for bumping this, but this is such a stunning image. It was a pleasure, editing this.
This is a sigmoid edit with the current weekly version (4.1.0+1165~gc0fa1b711).
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