gmic
a) sharpen using tone mapping
b) curves to increase brightness, contrast
c) apply gamma, crop (not a special ratio )
d) prep for your viewing pleasure
Edit: it doesn’t look good unless you click to zoom. As I said below:
The thing is that the mountains have lots of fine detail so they would look much better when viewed on a larger (and higher quality) screen or mode. I suppose that I could make it suitable for 690px or smaller widths but that would not do justice for such a magnificent view.
The technique is something I learned from @hanatos in this thread. I did not want to post the image itself because I am not happy with the results (yet). The settings are: profile: ILCE-6000 iso 500; mode: wavelets; strength: 0.028; blend: uniformly; blend mode: lightness.
Btw, does somebody know what the blotch in the lower right of this picture is and how to remove it with dt (besides cropping it away)?
That Is why I would wish for the ability to scroll through all the images of a thread zoomed. I often find that pictures that look good small not necesarilly look good big and vice versa.
BTW, nice version, what does highlight blend mode in dcraw do??
A. I recall the discussion on adding a gallery mode to discuss. The thing is that the mountains have lots of fine detail so they would look much better when viewed on a larger (and higher quality) screen or mode. I suppose that I could make it suitable for 690px or smaller widths but that would not do justice for such a magnificent view.
B. I believe that this mode is present in many raw processors. My understanding is that it is a compromise between clip and unclip modes. In dcraw, clip means that the multipliers go above 1 and values that exceed 255 or 65535 are clipped. Unclip means that the multipliers are normalized such that the greatest would be set to 1. That way, theoretically, there wouldn’t be any clipping from demosaicing.
The consequence of unclip is the possibility of color shift in the whites. Blend mode prevents that from happening. But I have noticed that the algorithm isn’t perfect and can actually produce clipping that is worse in appearance than clip itself. dcraw has other blend modes as well (RT has even more but many of the principles are the same) but I typically stick with clip, unclip and blend because of their simplicity. The rest I would rely on G’MIC or GIMP, or in your case RT, to do the heavy lifting.
@shreedhar : beautiful! Your colours look more natural than mine (when in darktable I first hit “Velvia” - maybe for the larches/lake a little bit overdone…). @afre: you observed the “details” in 183 (which seems to be kind of a favorite): when you do zoom in a lot you can even see the small cross at the main peak (in Austria on nearly every mountain peak there is a wooden/stelle cross with a height of typically 3-4 meter). @chris: with “blotch” in the lower right - do you mean the white spot? This is a house - I like to include - if possible -
somewhere a building in my pictures to make the dimensions visible - kind of “big nature” and “small human”.
Yes! I noticed that too . However, my minimalism may have selected demosaicing, sharpening and resizing methods that didn’t perserve the cross all that well. If you compare the dcraw and gmic outputs, the cross is definitely not as defined in the latter .
I enjoy that attention to detail and picking out points of interest in a photo. It is kind of my approach to PlayRaws as well. I would try to make it [1] unique, [2] have an experimental element, [3] while honoring the original photo. It is not always easy to balance those 3 elements since I am a beginner at post-processing; I started doing this just this year believe it or not. I couldn’t resist the PlayRaw!
I mean the foggy structure in the lower right part of the following image, which has different character than the rest of the fog. I first thought that it is a finger print at my display, but fingerprints usually do not zoom with the picture on the display, and I don’t think it is the house you are talking about.
@chris Yes, that is why I liked your other post. I didn’t want to make another remark about it but it is there. The bottom right of the patch might be a house but the patch itself looks out of place.
Very nice photos @seume! Noisiness is not necessarily a bad thing. It has given your photos a film look and I like it a lot. Their BW version would be definitely great, too
In the second photo (DSC00183.ARW) I made some dodging&burning in the foreground to give a bit more dramatic look.
@msd: thanks! I inspected your XMP for 217 and am really impressed - loads of sophisticated color settings and three profiled denoise with overall an effect totally eliminating noise, preserving all details and producing a nice grain. After having seen this I will never upload one of my XMPs (revealing how bloody a beginner to postprocessing I am… )
@seume It is still a good idea to release your XMPs to share your process. That is what PlayRaw is about. We learn from each other’s strengths and weaknesses .
You are all right (and I just exaggerated a little bit): sharing XMPs and how processing has been done is one of the goals of play_raw. Uploading… Uploading… Uploading…
And in fact - learning and getting inspired is central. As I always keep the original image (aka reality) in mind when postprocessing my personal goal is more to reproduce what I have seen than to be “too” creative (but this is just my focus). But I am very curious what others have in mind or try to achieve when postprocessing. I am also widely satisfied with my personal results (also when printing “fine art prints” - but that will be an other post). It is more a feeling not to make use of the potential of e.g. darktable - but achieving this is “just a learning process” - supported by you XMPs
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