[PlayRaw] Early light American White Pelicans

play_raw
Am I doing this right? Here is a Nikon d7000 NEF raw from 8:00am this morning in Montana. American White Pelicans. I’ve also uploaded the 600 pixel jpeg embedded in the enclosing RAW. I’m still working on the image myself. The embedded jpeg is ugly but I think it’s got potential. I’ve already done better (with rawtherapee and gimp) but I’d like to see what others might do too. Largely for my own education.

PIC_7135

PIC_7135.NEF (17.5 MB)

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fwiw here’s how I pull the embedded jpegs from Nikon RAWs

#!/bin/bash

filename=basename $1
base=${filename%.*}
echo $base
exiftool -b -PreviewImage -W! $base.jpg $1

=========

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A beautiful image: composition, color, textures. My take:

I did this in rawproc, and I used my regular config with my own D7000 camera profile instead of my playraw config with the dcraw profile. Converted to a Rec2020 working profile with 1.8 gamma, then did the following:

blackwhitepoint:rgb,31,149 
curve:rgb,0.0,0.0,30.0,12.0,101.0,116.3,255.0,255.0 
rotate:2.9,autocrop 
crop:0,0,4279,2912 
resize:800,0,catmullrom 
sharpen:1 

The curve was about pulling down the shadows, a thing I’m into lately. Rotate put the background lines and water square in the frame. Crop to pull attention to the swans. Resize and sharpen are standard for images I post to the web.

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PIC_7135

Darktable PIC_7135.NEF.xmp (7.5 KB)

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Nice photo @pittendrigh!

My Version with GIMP:

PIC_7135

  1. exported from darktable as it is, without base curve.
  2. straightened horizon (measure tool)
  3. Increased contrast of the entire image (curves) and brightened up pelicans (dodge)
  4. applied orton effect (enhanced brightness and contrast on duplicate layer, applied Gaussian blur and lowered transparency of that layer)
  5. applied vignette
  6. sharpened image with unsharp mask
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PIC_7135
darktable: PIC_7135.NEF.xmp (4.3 KB)

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PIC_7135
PIC_7135.NEF.pp3 (11.5 KB)
-Rawtherapee
-unsharp mask in darktable

second version( no sharpen):
PIC_7135b
PIC_7135.NEF.pp3 (11.8 KB)

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I too was drawn to high contrast processing, as an image to look at and enjoy. The first image below was my initial effort. But this exposure was made at 8:00 am at a high altitude reservoir in Montana. It was daytime. The second image below is less dramatic and perhaps less interesting. But it’s a closer match to what I actually saw as I pressed the shutter. Does match-the-snap matter?

I’ll try to make a third effort later today (I have a coding deadline to meet first), perhaps using masking somehow to paste the better-looking birds from the first image onto the more realistic background of the second image. Although…perhaps…realistic is or maybe isn’t the goal. It all depends.

PIC_7135_Pelicanos PIC_7135_Daylight-pelicans

3 Likes

very nice shot @pittendrigh ! Here is an attempt with RawTherapee dev 5.4-409-g99caa76f7.
The two pelicans on the left seem to be in their own world!! I therefore gave a bit of warmth to the photo to enhance that cosy feel.
PIC_7135-1.jpg.out.pp3 (11.9 KB)
PIC_7135-1

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Merci pour la belle photo!

PIC_7135
PIC_7135.NEF.xmp (5.9 KB)

Using RawTherapee:

PIC_7135

  1. dual demosaic (amaze + vng4) with contrast threshold 11
  2. aligned and cropped
  3. sharpened using RL deconvolution with Contrast threshold 20, radius 0.9, Amount 100, Damping 0 and iterations 30
  4. vibrance set to 50
  5. local contrast with default settings
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I think it does in journalism. Else, Reuters wouldn’t have put out the OOC-JPEG-ONLY dictum.

Thing is, literal interpretation of “match the snap” would be rather dark, owing to the linear nature of light intensity. Some sort of scaling is required. And then, you’re off into tone curves, camera curves, camera profiles, and all sorts of manipulations designed to get a “usable” image. How far does that go before it becomes unfaithful to the scene?

I think it depends on what’s important to you. If you want to faithfully render the scene you recall, that’s a worthy goal. Keep in mind though, the operations you describe, masking, layers, image-combining, are definitely in the category of “creative”…

Excellent PlayRaw!!

PIC_7135 PIC_7135.NEF.xmp (6.5 KB)

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Nice picture, thanks.

PIC_7135
PIC_7135.NEF.xmp (10,8 KB)

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PIC_7135.jpg.out.pp3 (10.6 KB)

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@pittendrigh Thanks for sharing.

My take. Recently, I have been going for a bold look in my PlayRaw processing. If you look at my entries before that, they were extremely mild or smooth, and therefore would take more viewing time to appreciate or otherwise would be easily dismissed as bland.

Also, rotating is hard as usual, I had to export multiple times and then examine at various zoom levels and crops in G’MIC to see whether the image felt balanced or not.

1. RawTherapee → AMaZE+VNG4 → pixel filters → Rec2020 linear → auto-matched curve → rotate → 32f.
2. gmic → local contrast → contrast → brighten → B&W → crop → local contrast → sharpen → resize → crush black → add frame → zoom 100% to enjoy!

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Thank you for all who “played” with this RAW. I learned a lot.
The following is not necessarily my favorite image of the bunch but it is the closest to what I actually saw that 8:00 am morning.

I used rawtherapee twice, once for the background and once again for the birds and then used a (gimp) desaturated mask in HSV mode to paste the bird exposure onto the background exposure.

PIC_7135_Good-morning-pelicans

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Lovely image!
Here’s mine with DT and GIMP:
PIC_7135.NEF.xmp (3.8 KB)

PIC_7135

Edit: apparently when I drag and drop from Geeqie it includes the original NEF file as well as the DT xmp. Let’s try that again.

2 Likes

Thanks for sharing.
I go with João Almeida’s Kodak Elite Chrome 400 film emulation + crop (angle)

PIC_7135.NEF.xmp (3.2 KB)

Gone for a more abstract angle with my Neon filter and some unusual curves:

image