Nothing fancy really. The obvious light source seems to be from the skylights. So just thought that I will create a beam of light flooding the main statue and reaching the white cloth on the altar. The rest should be darker.
To implement this, I just duplicated the layer twice, made the top layer blend mode to screen. Put in a black layer mask and used gradient tool (FG TO BG) to apply it only on the left 2/3rd of the image. Applied that mask to the image and again repeated the same with right 2/3rd selected. When I apply it, the screen blend is visible only to the middle 1/3rd. Merged down this layer.
Repeated the same till I satisfied with the result.
Since foreground and the sides are darker than the top center of the image, I feel it gives a 3D effect.
Many interesting and different interpretations, even showing that noise isn’t a bad thing necessarily 
Here’s my workflow:
1 - 4 x 7 x DNG → Hdrmerge - dynamic range compression of the seven different exposures → 4 x DNG
2 - 4 x DNG → Rawtherapee - Noise reduction and bad pixels → 4 x TIF 32 bit floating point and REC2020
3 - 4 x TIF 32 bits floating point and REC2020 → Gimp / G’mic → stack the 4 images (median) to reduce noise → TIF 32 bits floating point and REC2020
4 - TIF 32 bits floating point and REC2020 → Photoflow - generation of 5 images at 1 EV exposure steps: -1, 0, +1, +2 and +3 → 5 16 bit TIF REC2020
5 - 5 x TIF of 16 bits REC2020 → Gimp → Create masks to highlight / conceal light/noise, embedding them as alpha channels - 5 x 16 bits TIF REC2020 with alpha channels
6 - 5 x 16 bit TIF REC2020 with alpha channels → Enfuse → New dynamic range compression with more noise elimination → 16 bit TIF REC2020
7 - 16 bit TIF REC2020 → Darktable - various final adjustments (toning, curves, noise reduction, wb, exposure, local contrast, sharpening) → 8-bit JPG sRGB
My attempt using mostly Darktable.
-Applied a style I have for HDR preparation, basically removing the default sharpening and adding Base Curve, Highlight Reconstruction and Lens Correction.
-Denoise (bilateral) with radius 18, red and blue channels at max and green at default. This got rid of most of the noise.
-Copied this across all images.
-Exported all to Enfuse with the ‘pseudo hdr or dff image’ plugin as 16 bit tif.
-On the resulting tif: adjust white balance, Tone Curve for added contrast and Color Contrast for added saturation. Color Zones to boost the reds and blues a bit and Color Correction to reduce a blue cast in the blacks. Crop and Rotate to make the image level.
-Then I had some extra noise reduction in Neat Image (might be considered cheating since it is not open source software?).
-final sharpening in Darktable.
You might alleviate that burden by posting the input file to Neat Image 
Now talking serious, I’m really curious at how far you could reduce noise before Neat
@Thomas_Do I’m trying to load your sidecar file but nothing happens.
Is it a DT version incompatibility?
Mine is:
darktable --version
this is darktable 2.4.3
copyright (c) 2009-2018 johannes hanika
darktable-dev@lists.darktable.org
compile options:
bit depth is 64 bit
normal build
SSE2 optimized codepath enabled
OpenMP support enabled
OpenCL support enabled
Lua support enabled, API version 5.0.0
Colord support enabled
gPhoto2 support enabled
GraphicsMagick support enabled
OpenEXR support enabled
I definitely made the colours and noise excessive enough to hurt your eyes 
and to express my feelings on the subject of oppression and obtuseness of the architecture. Also, my take is a little reminiscent of tourists using flash 
when they aren’t supposed to. 
I’d say that is quite the adventure that you had there!
I posted the wrong file. I already deleted the oringinal when cleaning up yesterday 
. Sorry!
Very interesting image @gadolf!
I took the opportunity to test a new dynamic range compression module that I am adding into PhotoFlow (similar to the tone mapping module in Darktable). Here is what I have been able to obtain so far:
The steps are relatively simple:
- opened all images in HDRMerge and saved the result as a 32f DNG
- loaded the HDR DNG in PhotoFlow
- applied chromatic aberrations correction and blend HL reconstruction
- increased exposure by 2EV
- applied the new dynamic range compression module, followed by a filmic tone mapping curve (to compress the highlights) and an additional S-shaped curve
- rotation to straighten the framing
The processing is a bit “over the top” for my personal taste, but shows the potential of the algorithm. I will add the corresponding PFI file as soon as the new code will be committed to GitHub.
What do you think?
@Carmelo_DrRaw Adding this new tool is great for hdr addicts like me.
As for the result, can you reveal more details from that coloured glass on top (sorry, I forgot the word in Portuguese…)? I think it is a good test for your new tool.
With enfuse, I could get some details, by masking the more exposed frames before fusing.
As a gimp/nufraw/g’mic user, here is my KISS version (only the central exposure and the lightest and darkest, fed into my ‘Three Exposures’ plugin.
-
For each exposure, create 16-bit file in nufraw but do not use the denoising feature there (on some of my pics, it helps, but here it only softened them). Instead use gimp’s noise reduction with the default setting of 4 on each.
-
Open the “correct” exposure, use my plugin to merge the other two.
-
Add g’mic’s Local Contrast Enhancement.
-
Sharpen with gimp’s GEGL unsharp mask at the default settings.
-
Scale from 4036 pix wide to 2018, convert to 8-bit precision, save as jpeg.
This is the second attempt, on the first I went severely over the top with contrast - lovely shiny gilding but of course a loss of detail around the seats.
Maybe what I want to do is produce postcard-style gaudy prints. My own photos are usually taken pointing slightly down, and often a bit angled, and with very visible barrel distortion at wider settings - and I try to fix that up.
So here I’ve added negative lens distortion, rotated a couple of degrees, then used the perspective tool to try to get the side verticals acceptable (all in gimp). Cropped to approx 5:4. Then I’ve used the old Advanced Tone Mapping script, some more contrast, and g’mic octave sharpening. This was just a quick hack, starting from the previous xcf file (which was already sharpened).
I expect everybody here is going to hate me for doing this, but at least the colours are now more likely to hurt your eyes 
EDIT: some of the relevant files are available here: f1r:play-raw-warning-baroque-can-harm-your-eyes
dng -> rawtherapee +-----> enfuse ---+-> rawtherapee -> gimp -> gmic split wavelets
+-> imagemagick Mean +|
All pp3 are equal except for the darker image which has been darkened of 1/3 stop to recover highlights.
In gimp I’ve merged the enfuse and mean images and further worked them after frequency separation
RT invoked as:
rawtherapee-cli -s -b16 -tz \
-o ../tmp1/${dst} \
-c *.dng *.RAF *.NEF *.ARW
aligned with:
align_image_stack -v \
-p review.pto \
-a ais_ \
--gpu \
--corr=0.95 \
-c 24 \
-t 15 \
-m \
--use-given-order \
*.tif
enfuse HDR (which I didn’t like very much this time)
enfuse --blend-colorspace ciecam --depth=16 \
--saturation-weight=0.6 --contrast-weight=0.2 --entropy-weight=0.2 \
--hard-mask \
--output=fused/enfuse-${d}.tif \
tmp2/${d}/*.tif
Mean of images (which strangely gave better results)
convert \
-depth 16 \
tmp2/${dst}/*.tif \
-evaluate-sequence Mean \
merged/${i}-${dst}.tif
That matches perfectly the topic
You are right, so sorry, i’ll move it to a separate thread.
No, I meant that it matches perfectly the topic because it causes harm to eyes.
Thanks @gadolf for the showing and sharing the humble entrance of the jesuit’s hut, like it that is crooked, lord have mercy and golden showers each of the words, baby jesus flying like a ketamin butterfly … here here a humble servant. A lot of interesting approaches from everyone =)
Personally wanted to try the penguin’s new dress and so secondly went with single raw and some unorthodentist approach (changed from standard to raw color)… but boy @Carmelo_DrRaw this last iteration of PhF is unstable… fast, yes, breathtakingly so, but very hungry ghost driven, brace yourself when editing jeje. Anyway I cowardly jumped the boat here
raw_color.pfi.zip (2.8 KB)
Then firstly I hdrmerged the motherphotons whith such bad taste that a trail of phosphorescents ants followed me all the way to hell. Then so to synth hdrmerge >> PhF (behaving under the influence {of speed} cortex nimb) >> woodoo g’mic and a LUT… 'cause the acronyms helps evacuate. It looks a bit like aggrigio’s but I swear I stole it myself. Wel enough BS, a good nite 4all
from_hdr.pfi (46.0 KB)