Well, this image has me beaten, or at least disappointed. I simply can’t find a way of processing it that matches how it looked. There is a wide dynamic range and also mixed colour temperature, as parts of the landscape are in the shadow of heavy clouds, with pools of sunlight breaking through in parts of the valley.
I’ve processed it in Darktable 3.0.0RC1, and also tried DT 2.6.2, but can’t get either the strong contrast between the pools of light and shadow areas, or a natural looking green in the foliage. Hopefully someone else here will have a better idea of how to approach it. I’ve included the JPG I’m least dissatisfied with. Have fun!
I will for sure take a stab at it tonight or tomorrow night when I have time. To me this seems like a great candidate for parametric masking and a bit of luminosity mask work with some luminosity selection Dodge and burn in Gimp. Can’t wait to give it a go. Beautiful shot.
I have done selection on the sky with Krita. I ended up painting the sky selection rather than magnetic selection. Not uploading the Krita file as it’s 200K kb.
I used Easy Burn blend mode on a burn adjustment layer to fix the sky after the RawTherapee step. There has been some G’MIC DCP dehaze used.
I like this moody monochrome take on the scene. I was obsessing about trying to capture the colourful and sunny mood, but this feels like a very valid alternative way of looking at it. I see you used tone curves, while I was trying to get away with only the newer tools in DT3, and it wasn’t working.
In my apprentice workflow, I almost never rely on the new tools solely, I only use them to compress dynamic range and give every tone a chance to be fairly displayed. Usually, tone eq. and filmic give a more tone balanced image, but still dull to my eyes. When I get to that point, then I start beautifying the image to my taste.
thanks
Actually this was only a “sloppy” edit but I wanted to participate in this “discussion” because I had not participated in a play raw discussion in a long time and I liked your photo. (Afterall if I upload a raw to playraw I expect reactions too…)
Well, you have the xmp file, but maybe a word about how I did it: I think I used the contrast equalizer, pulled all parts of the L-curve to the top (kind of extreme clarity) and then tried to limit the effect to the sky with a parametric mask.
But as I said, this is sloppy.
