I modified the contrast and whitebalance first, to get a ‘regular’ image. Note the histogram, the white balance is simply the adjustment of the red and blue multipliers to make those right-hand points all align with green.
The curve is my attempt at “poor man’s layers”, desaturating the background and punching up the foreground, which already have some separation by tone. The saturation tool is just a feeble-minded attempt to take that further.
By way of explanation, the displayed image is the product of all the tools, indicated by the checkbox at the end of the tool chain. The tool displayed in the parameters pane is the one selected in the tool list, which in this case is not the end of the chain. Tools are applied to the raw image in order, top-to-bottom.
This is kind of fascinating, having been there, I experienced a sense of bleakness of the desert landscape, which was reflected in a somewhat washed out desaturated edit. However, most everyone else seemed to want to pump up the saturation a bit.
You’re too kind. There are many people here that are WAY better than me! I realized I didn’t even use denoise on the edit. I will attach a new sidecar file with the denoise method I like to use.
I guess I just don’t agree with heavy saturation as much that the other people used, and as to denoise, the only denoise that would be necessary would be chrominance noise reduction, in the case of making a very saturated edit. My edit did produce some luminance noise, but that was due to me wanting a filmic look, using RL deconvolution sharpening with no thresholding or dampening (my default preset).
Second try, “correct” wb, and new filmic tool tweakings to reduce contrast (regarding my first version) and pop out shadows. Pretty cool this new tool!
@Waveluke thanks for sharing the mcruhhet raw. It is funny how something more to the abstract side of the spectrum yields such different approaches… so I wonder if it’s because no reference… anyway, @Thomas_Do I guess from up there the carpet is more homogeneous, yours is my fav version . @heckflosse tight crop man!!! @HIRAM like the colours and the shower curtain approach, wach the mercury in the tunna! @yteaot a bit too crispy, but those pastels gave me a hard-on
then gimp and gmic; by the end I had to de-contrast the image… we have the unhealthy tendency… Also used a washed out (~30& lum and 45% ch) kodak tetrachrom 400 stock LUT below which helped a nicer colour relation between the hot hils and darker BKGD (of course, but absolutely of coursely) punctuated by our friend the trees!! Viva los trees!!!