I don’t take photos often. I would rather enjoy the moment and not fiddle with the camera with my arthritic unsteady hands. This is a view I see everyday outside my window, but today I thought to myself, Isn’t that quite beautiful?
I went to find my camera, proceeded to remove the bug screen, popped in the SD card and took a snap as the light was changing. Not as golden as my eyes saw. I looked at the preview and then back at the view. Not even close – oh well, it is a rather mundane scene anyway. (Hope the neighbour didn’t notice me pointing a camera at them.)
I will leave out the second shot, as it is an in-between of the first and third. Let’s see what interesting stuff you can do with what you are given. Wow us and have fun.
Thought of that a while back; felt overused. Maybe when we have another PlayRaw dry spell.
The scene was much brighter than my preview images let on. Sorry I didn’t make them scene-referred. Maybe 1-2 stops too dark. The white panelling of the houses were bright.
Due to the clouds there wasn’t much difference in brightness or contrast between the foreground, background and sky. Yet, every object was well-illuminated and distinct; neither grey or saturated. It was likely the delicate balance that made the otherwise boring scene attractive.
The sunlight penetrated the retinue of auto-cumuli from the left just outside of the frame. The face of the centre and right condos are very reflective, so they donned the soft bright golden yellow.
then she tasted the smallest bowl, which belonged to the Little Bear, and it was just right, —Goldilocks and the Three Bears
@shreedhar Your edit has the right idea. Foreground: I would include everything save the condo / apartments and the sky. Brighten those and you are one step closer.
@Jacal’s centre and right condos are the closest yet.
One of the current missteps is making the golden yellow a global colour cast. It wasn’t like that. Only the more reflective surfaces had it. And only the places where the sun shone through the alto-cumuli.
Let’s poke at our taciturn digital painters and see what they have to offer in terms of advice. I wouldn’t mind if one or two gave this PlayRaw a try. @briend@Americo etc. (I miss @Elle.)
Clarification: I welcome all types of processing not just scene-referred.
Thanks @Antonio_Mini. Your attempt is the closest so far. The whites in the foreground are quite distracting; could be duller. Moreover, the foreground could be slightly warmer.
Thanks to @afre for being an buildingphile and sharing it; also thanks to people contributing their (diversified) renderings =)
I’ll start from the end, like a crab eating his own funeral snacks, what ew when… {very old man with the longest white beard advising a youngster} but sir, you’re naked. At the very end I realised that there was something wrong with the result, no it was not me mind obscured by the clouds, neither the blue sun {wink}, it was garbage, binary garbage that had given birth to a ghost wireframe (it’s like I’m writing for GITS). Anyway at first I thought was a misaligned layer in gimp but when I found out it had followed me way back from photocrostflew… there’s no way I’m processing this again… and contributing to this refreshing positiveness was the fact that editing the 32bit tif in gimpo had been a bit of a hassle. So here here:
Then back to the beginning; Dr Pinguino-coder had promised enhancements in PhF (photo hermaphrodite frankenstein), so I went on checking them as subjectively as possible. The app is fast, a bit more stable and though masks are still not working within a DR layer, my main frustration came from the scale and rotate and crop tools; it would be no crazy idea to imagine this damp frustration embodying a stupid mindless penis and attacking the image in such terrifying fashion that an entity tried to separate itself from the very zerone fabric… My main goal was to bring a touch of light to the lower foreground and try to achieve a bit of separation between elements.
For the final stage went to gimp and g’mic. The way I deal with developing an image is a bit like painting, in the sense that there’s a lot of back and forth, tiny strokes, experimenting, mixing (separating colour and light), revealing and covering up, diluting, bring attention… and even if I have like a colour palette or an idea of what I’d like to do, I try to stay permeable to changes, to surprises, to the process’ own entropy inA suspended a have to get lost paradox. That all sound charming but it’s a royal PITA and it’s true that one can slow down and enjoy the ride, but sometimes there’s this energy that needs moving, dealing, flowing and if tools can’t keep up it can turn into a discouraging struggle. That said I used g’mic’s tools in diluted layers to gain a bit of contrast and definition, LCE, DRicrease and RLsharpening, also a monochrome layer to bring saturation down in some places and a Provia 100F emu… at this time O was a bit tired of the hustle… I even forgot the grain!!! A hell of a ride or a ride in hell je je je Cheers =)
Appreciate your words master-misc afre ha!!!
No high-tech B5 space crabs, just good old HEAF human error after frustration jeje
it’s okay… it adds more value to the thing, should learn from Basquiat.
Cheers brother
That’s strange… can you describe what you are trying to do in the dedicated thread? Thanks!
Please, ideas, ideas and still more ideas! I’d be happy to incorporate any suggestions in those tools. Let’s open a new thread about this, or a github issue…
by @afre.
.
I hope you will come back to it someday. 
afre ha!!!