The leaves had different shades of red, yellow and brown. The lake and the sky had a nice blue color. And the mountains in the background were more clear and distinguishable.
Yes, you did have room for a bit more exposure, maybe a stop or so. But it doesn’t hurt the image as far as I can see; there are no large textures in the low regions that would exhibit noise.
I think the haze works for you; there are at least five distinguishable distances in the mountain range, and really all the tone is there. Here’s the the “rawproc XMP”, the toolchain commentary. Firstoff, I pulled the tools out of my normal raw processing group, made them individual so I could work on whitebalance:
colorspace:camera,assign - you camera’s RT camconst.json primaries
subtract:camera - Your camera requires subtraction of 512 from each raw pixel…
whitebalance:camera - I started with the camera-supplied multipliers and tried to make-nice by manually messing with them, but abandoned that for some per-channel curves, below…
demosaic:amaze - An amazing image deserves amazing demosaic, don’tcha think?
blackwhitepoint:rgb,data - Normalizing the image data for the 0.0 - 1.0 floating point space. Of note was that I didn’t need to use the minwhite option which scales saturated channels out of the image; you didn’t have any clipping.
curve:blue,0.0,0.0,121.0,100.0,255.0,255.0 - Here’s where I went non-linear in the color manipulation. On the blue channel, just a pull-down in the middle, which let the ends gradually slope to the linear limits.
curve:red,0.0,0.0,22.0,30.0,92.0,83.1,191.0,203.5,255.0,255.0 - Okay, I went all Monet here, put in a lift down at the bottom, drug it below linear at the midpoint, then pulled it up at the top to keep the clouds relatively neutral vice the blue. At this point, I’d abandoned colorimetric accuracy, as I was seeing pastels and like them…
curve:rgb,0.0,0.0,7.0,6.0,15.0,20.8,20.0,37.5,80.0,151.9,255.0,255.0 - After I finished it, this curve looked a lot like the filmic curve I abandoned, nice toe at the bottom, fairly big lift in the midsection.
saturation:1.30 - Just a bit of color saturation, seemed to do-up the pastels nicely…
group: - The regular PlayRaw resize.
resize:1080;
sharpen:1;
These are not the colors you are looking for… but I fell in love with them…
So lovely!
I would post-process it like this. Though, I am not sure how much it looks like what you saw in real. Graduated density filters (either physical or in post processing) help a lot when the sky is so bright that makes foreground underexposed.
Drama and Overdrive were raised to the max, with Film Area reduced in order to make haloing less visible.
Then the White Clipping Point was brought way down to brighten up the image, and the Shadow Brightness decreased a tad and Highlight Brightness maxed out in order to add contrast.
Great image! Here’s a take on it using Filmic RGB and the Tone equalizer (lifted the “foreground” tones quite a bit). Also some saturation and local contrast added. DSC00128.ARW.xmp (14.9 KB)
Nice photo.
Within RT I’ve menaged to reach the right exposition and, according to your wish - “The leaves had different shades of red, yellow and brown. The lake and the sky had a nice blue color. And the mountains in the background were more clear and distinguishable.” In any case, somehow
