[Play Raw] Waterfowl, Bridge and Sunrise

Here’s a picture that I’m playing around with. I am trying to figure how to get more color saturation in the sky. This is what I got using only RawTherapee. JPG resized to 1920px wide. :sunglasses:

0U4A6095.CR2.pp3.bak.pp3 (12.5 KB)

Raw File Here.

Released under CC BY-SA license.

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DarkTable and Gimp. Threw a bunch of filters on it, can’t remember what…

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Looks really nice. If you remember how you got the sky to look that way, please let me know!


0U4A6095-2.jpg.out.pp3 (11.9 KB)

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Done in darktable 2.6, look at the lowpass filter.
0U4A6095.CR2.xmp (8.8 KB)

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My try in darktable.


0U4A6095.CR2.xmp (8,6 KB)

0U4A6095.CR2.pp3 (12.7 KB)

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Wow Age! Really nice. I’m still going through your pp3 file to try and find your secret sauce. I suspect it’s in the color toning/masking somewhere. Unfortunately, since that feature is so new, I do not have any experience with it. I’ll keep experimenting.

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0U4A6095.CR2.xmp (9.7 KB)
0U4A6095_01.CR2.xmp (10.4 KB)

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My try in darktable 2.60
0U4A6095.CR2.xmp (7,1 Ko)

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0U4A6095.CR2.xmp (10.5 KB)

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I’ve been working on my colors in my photos lately. And trying to be deliberate about setting a color pallet for each image. So in my example that started this thread, I was going for a primary color scheme: red, blue, yellow.

So, for instance, in the trees, I shifted the hue (HH) in the LAB controls to move the blue-green where the trees initially were, and made them more blue to fit my pallet better. I also tweaked hues on the bridge to push it towards a shade of red. The yellow is in the sky, the reflection of the sky in the water, and the wall behind the right side of the bridge.

But it’s sort of hard to see the colors in the sky and brighter reflections in the water. So I’m trying to figure how to bring up the color a little better.

That was my thought process as I processed this.

I didn’t work on colours for this image. Instead I tried to get a nice crop

where two ducks are in each (harmonic means) third of the lower part of the image…

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Why did you choose these colors? What emotions do you hope to convey in manipulating your palette towards those colors?

When I look at this image, I get the feeling of technology vs nature, the opposition of the two. The geometric bridge is juxtaposed against the softness of nature. The geometry violates nature, you can see this in the reflection of the bridge separating one bird from the rest, with another bird looking like its swimming back to help. The rest of the birds are swimming away. I think @heckflosse’s wonderful crop really helps drive home this explanation.

If we accentuate the red/yellow in the photo, one would think nature is angry or raging back against this. If you tinted the sky more towards blue, as in @racer-x’s version , one might think nature is accepting. It depends on which way you want to go.

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Thanks for this compliment :blush:

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0U4A6095.pfi (31.4 KB)

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Riffing off of @paperdigits’s comments and @heckflosse’s work, I will give nature the upper hand.

1. RawTherapee → heckflosse’s pp3
2. ImageMagick → liquid rescale

Zoom 100% and enjoy!

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Honestly, my reasoning for the 3 colors was much less sexy than your musings. I recently bought a couple video courses on color grading. And I am trying to apply what’s in the courses to my own work.

So I dropped sample points on a bunch of colors in the picture, and figured I could shoehorn the hues into a R/Y/B pallet without getting artifacts from too much crazy hue shifting.

The interesting thing was that the trees looked green to my eye, but according to the sample point, converted to HSV, they were midway between blue/green. The blue is probably coming from the sky’s light since the trees weren’t being hit with direct sun. They look green to humans, because we recognize them as trees and trees are supposed to be green. That’s my guess anyways. The pink comes from the rising sun, which counts for red. There were also some purples that I pushed towards red.

A lot of this stuff you’d never notice with your eye. As with the trees, you need to use the color sample picker to know what the color really is. It’s one of the more interesting things I gleaned from the video course that I bought.

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LOL Afre - that bridge looks like it’s sinking into the earth. This is some giant earthquake/apocalypse scene now.

Nice photo @Stampede. Admire the dedication to get up early to take this shot. Wish I had some of it!
Personally, I liked the out of focus green leaves in the foreground (I felt it gave a sense of involvement (watching stealthily) to the viewer). Felt that the shadows and the colors of the trees have to be lifted up for them to meaningfully contribute to the image. Sharpened it a bit but main work was done in the L,A,B curves of the LAB module. A tiny bit of Haze Removal was used too.
This time, I am uploading a 4K resolution image because of the pastel colours in the photo (less chance of posterisation)
0U4A6095.jpg.out.pp3 (11.9 KB)