Let’s see what everyone comes up with and thank you @MLC for providing us great portrait to play with!
Note: I know we’re calling this “PlayRaw”, but I honestly think it’s more fun to just go ahead and use whatever FL/OSS you want in your processing. Don’t feel constrained to raw processors only!
After this PlayRaw we’ve got a neat street shot from @Phil_Howcroft to experiment with. Stay tuned!
I basically made very few adjustments. Exposure, LAB lightness, LAB contrast. Noise reduction (+impulse), RL sharpening a smidge, lowered chromaticity.
From there it was into GIMP for some usual stuff (wavelet decompose + freckle enhancements + dodge&burn).
At first I was scratching my head looking at the linear data, but then I remembered a trick to bringing out details is to use tone mapping. So I deployed various Luminance HDR operations in to McGimp 2.9 layers. beta-boosted Fattal serves as the base, default Mantiuk in overlay mode, fine-tuned Ashikim eqn 4 in color mode. Separate unsharps and curves for each layer. The flattened image had further sharpening with the brush, as well as the dodge-n-burn treatment. Some items cloned out. Noise in background blurred. Remixed with a basic Rawtherapee edit. Resized and contrast boosted in Rawtherapee, Richardson-Lucy deconvolution on the output, dialed down.
RawTherapee
Usual controls plus Lab LH CH to reduce orange and increase blue.
Some trial and error with wavelets, to try and enhance eyes and control freckles. Just started to investigate bit by bit to learn what they can do, so hopefully they can become part of my controlled toolset Morgin_Carpenter_DSC_1922.NEF.pp3 (10.4 KB)
This is my edit of the raw file. Everything done in PhotoFlow.
I adjusted the contrast, exposure and then I wanted to get rid of those points in the background that I thought they were distracting. I did it by working on two layers with the one below, moved to the left using the X,Y coordinate boxes in PhotoFlow. The same way @patdavid describes on his tutorial about portrait retouching. Finally, saturation adjustment, toning, cropping and sharpening using the fine details and vignetting.
No one has yet tried with a B&W conversion, so here it comes!
I have increased the exposure by 2.4EV, then did a straight B&W conversion using the Lab L channel.
Then I added some mid-tones local contrast, excluding the face with a mask except for the eyes where I’ve applied a stronger effect. Next I have adjusted the overall contrast with an S-shaped curve like that:
Finally I have added some vignetting, and that’s the final result:
For me this shot was all about Finn’s eyes. They do the craziest things!
I started out with some very basic RAW tuning in UFRaw and opened it in GIMP. I then went ahead and cropped to a 5:7 ratio and very lightly touched up his face so as not to disturb the freckles. Adding a Portra 800 G’MIC emulation (thank you, @patdavid) gave it the tones I wanted and some slight vignetting to further focus attention to those eyes seemed appropriate. I finished it off with a wavelet sharpen layer and a touch of grain.
I used my regular batched workflow based on a script which combines ufraw-batch and imagemagick to output a basic 16-bit TIFF for me to play with. I loaded the TIFF into digiKam’s Showfoto image editor to deal with the overall levels & curves as well as determining the optimum crop with relative size and various help lines. Lastly I imported the image into Gimp 2.9.2 to make a selection around the eyes and enhance those with some quick fixes to saturation and contrast. My only non-FOSS step is denoising and sharpening of the whole image with NeatImage for Linux - I have not found a proper option to replace it but it is relatively cheap and has a very generous lifetime upgrade policy.
@HIRAM I’ve seen various TMOs being used on portraits before, but the result they all have in common is the typical “HDR-look”, unnatural and generally uninteresting because you see that overused look everywhere. Your version is not only natural but also very clear and in my opinion the best here. I wanted to let you know, because you’re doing something very right
Is there any chance you could link to the intermediate Fattal, Mantiuk and Ashikim layers? As separate images or as XCF, doesn’t matter, I’m just very curious to see what you worked with.
I’m curious to know what you think of a second interpretation of mine, processed to bring out more of the fine detail (freckles, etc.) that you seem to prefer.
thanks for the comments, @Morgan_Hardwood Unfortunately I’ve recycled the bits that went into making the image, rats. I utilize this type of layering a lot, so perhaps in a future post I’ll show more details.
here’s my pass at it using rawtherapee and gimp. not totally happy with it, but that’s what I get for experimenting haha! if I had to vote for one so far it would be arctic’s version.
To my taste it’s a bit too uniformly pastel (luminance too low) and a bit too saturated leading to a lack of depth - I used to process portraits like that myself some years ago, but now I ebb towards a less saturated and less bright look.
Rawtherapee + Gimp_G’MIC filters for the illustrative/painting look (several layers, some masking to preserve some detail in freckles ans the sweater hood, and slight touch of dodging of the eye irises).
Rawtherapee with an Ilford Pan F Plus 50 film emulation and tone mapping to bring our the hair detail
A crop to remove redundant space and the logo from the coat, then sent the file to GIMP to ‘heal select’ the knotts in the wood which were catching my eye and distracting from Morgin
20th entry, couldn’t resist those innocent frecks. Mostly gmic and curves within gimp, love the 32 flotating WF but everything’s just too damn slow.Thanks MILC for the milk and everybody else participating
