My usual go-to solution is to play with base curve upping its lower-left region using a logarithmic scale. However in this particular image I just can’t make the dark part light and contrast-y enough without losing too much of the blue-ness up top.
I tried to play with exposure fusion in the baseline plugin, but it looks like my internal model of how it works doesn’t really produce the results I expect: the sky still gets washed out in the end.
So how would you go about doing it? How baseline curve and fusion parameters are supposed to work together? May be blending with a mask is in order (I run 2.4.0, so it actually can blend a base curve)? Or is there a magical plugin “leave the sky alone and make it cartoonishly blue”?
A quick exercise with both “tone mapping” and “global tonemap” didn’t yield anything pleasant though, as the former produces artifacts around palm leaves, and the latter washes out /desaturates everything too quickly. But I’ll keep trying. Luminosity masks sounds particularly promising to me for some reason.
I used two instances of “shadows and highlights” in darktable but reset highlight to 0 for both. Second instance is blended with a graduated mask to get a smooth transition to the lighter parts of the image. DSCF3284.RAF.xmp (5.5 KB)
Edit: further tweaking of the two instances would improve the result. This were just a few seconds of editing.
is using darktable a hard requirement, or would you be interested in alternative solutions as well?
The image is part of a big collection which I’m processing in DT and my whole workflow is built around it. Breaking out of it for just one image would just be impractical.
I used a parametric mask in exposure to move the data to the right. Then some levels, shadows and highlights, dehaze, highpass… DSCF3284.RAF.xmp (9.2 KB)
@David_LaCivita that is a wonderful, vibrant and realistic result. Could you explain what you did, in program-agnostic terms, so that users of other software can get the idea?
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