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.
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:
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.
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.
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)
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”…
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!
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.