It was this June at an Italian seaside when I went for an evening shooting a fiume sile, which is close to Lido di Jesolo. Besides other nice sujets especially this watergate and the associated house attracted me: I’ve been there some times for cycling but the windows were never open and never any people around. Nevertheless the house was in good shape decorated with wonderful flowers.
When trying to develop it in darktable, I kept in mind the circumstances and the mood around this subject:
This shots has been made at around 9.30 pm. The sun was gone for half an hour and everything was very quite and calm (see the other photos at my gallery). The direction of the shot was north west thus the sky in that direction was still quite bright and yellowish. The strong artificial lighting put the watergate in a wonderful evening light. Thus the house, which attracted me as the main subject for this shot was quite in the dark, “sandwiched” between the sky and the handrail and gangway of the watergate. I selected my shot carefully, used a tripod and focussed manually.
In Darktable I used in my developing try two ND-grad filters: one to darken the sky, the other to darken the foreground. I don’t want to get the house unnatural bright, but for my feeling it’s still too dark.
This been said, I wonder if you want to give it a try? The RAW is license CC-BY-SA.
Here is my take, processed with PhotoFlow with some gamma adjustment to brighten the image, some vignetting and then a Polaroid film emulation to give it an “old photo” look:
thanks @seume for the raw and the context, also everybody sharing their processing.
I’m not happy with what I managed, but maybe we can share also our failures, {silly italian accent} look Luiggi this is Failure, my sun… say hello Failure quack quack
Anyway Rawtherapee (@HIRAM patched) got me here, too much detail and TM
In retrospective I should have gone for a House of the Devil look, it would have been more fun. To finish and as mere curiosity, this is photolemurs’ (supposed AI, or neural or unicorn’s gold fart) rendering
The house looked a bit flat so duplicated the layer in the gimp and set the layer mode to softlight. Then new from visible. Duplicated that and made one dark, set a layer mask fully transparent and used brushes to allow the house on the brighter layer below to show through. Most of the tricky bits were done via GIMP’s paint a straight line facility. All but the roof line can be done quickly.
The roof line proved to be a problem. Seems to be some chromatic problems. Tried all sorts for too long but couldn’t get a clean line. In the end - new from visible when I had it as good as I could. Duplicate. straight line select the roof in that chopping off the nasties, invert selection and paint that transparent. Then offset that layer a bit to mask the defects. I’d had enough so saved and quit. Looking at the result I should have magnified the roof layer a bit as that could have hid all of the blend lines.
I used Filmulator with CA Correction on, Drama of 63, and White Clipping Point of 0.62.
I was originally planning on saving two versions with different white balance to correct for the greener foreground, and then merging them in GIMP, but I think it looks fine as shot.
I have been a few days AFTK - and thanks to you all for your input and showing me what could be possible. It is impossible to name a favorite, but the direction of @yteaot@chroma_ghost@CarVac and like show me some pictures which are far better than mine (being much too dark - I see now). Going for BW is also a brilliant idea, especially as technical stuff as the handrails are involved. Maybe some “red rose before BW background”-stuff could work (I’ll try it). @Ajohn caught very well the idea described.
This is a great place to get ideas and improve your technical skills! thanks again.
The roof line proved to be a problem. Seems to be some chromatic problems. Tried all sorts for too long but couldn’t get a clean line. In the end - new from visible when I had it as good as I could. Duplicate. straight line select the roof in that chopping off the nasties, invert selection and paint that transparent. Then offset that layer a bit to mask the defects. I’d had enough so saved and quit. Looking at the result I should have magnified the roof layer a bit as that could have hid all of the blend lines.
