Using what I remembered from the Harry Durgin low+high pass video, I threw the kitchen sink at it:
IMG_8936.CR2.xmp (7.7 KB)
2 Likes
Aloha everyone. That is a beautiful shot. I just love the rice? in the foreground, and the smoke, and the old roofs. I got a little artistic with it too 
Tried to give a little bit of a sunny feel and some nice rich colors for a relaxed atmosphere. Took me 3 passes in Darktable.
I’d be glad to attach my xmp files if anyone’s interested. But I’m new to this group and don’t have permission yet.
IMG_8936_01.tif.xmp (5.2 KB)
IMG_8936.tif.xmp (5.3 KB)
IMG_8936.CR2.xmp (10.3 KB)
7 Likes
Great!
My status got elevated and I was able to upload my xmp files Yay!
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Sorry, @harry_durgin! I was on work travel or I would have elevated your account as soon as I could!
(I did go ahead and push it up anyway, just to be sure).
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Sorry, I do not see the xmp. I know it’s my fault. Where is it kept?
They show up for me at the underneath the picture I posted.
Opss… I just have seen it above. Thanks.
But… Why there are also two tif.xmp? I am missing something due to my ignorance 
Thanks, Harry. I just have discovered them
I did a first pass to get the white balance, denoise, large scale tonal adjustments, etc. The 2nd pass was to get into shading and more color enhancement, then a final pass for white and black points, final sharpening and such. I saved as tif in between each pass.
I understand now 
1 Like
Hello @McCap,
I like the picture, it makes me think of my old Chuck Norris movies, like “missing in action”.
I tried an HDR again and finished it in RT with a self brewed HaldClut to vintage B&W.
The HDR made from script : one neutral, one +1.5, one -1.5 in RT → then LuminanceHDR → Fusion from HDR and neutral picture, finaly in RT with the Haldclut.
Luminance HDR 2.4.0 tonemapping parameters:
Operator: Mantiuk06
Parameters:
Contrast Mapping factor: 0.9
Saturation Factor: 1.5
Detail Factor: 20
PreGamma: 0.75
Regards,
Marc
5 Likes
First off thank you @McCap for the raw and the sharing experience =) and all people participating and contributing 
their versions
This image was so interesting and it has taken me so many “approaches” to come to peace with what I was seeing. At the beggining my first re-action was to make it as beutiful as possible… {buzz} WRONG! Then I went on a light savaging journey {sinking} glub glub 
Finally I gave up and I only played around with it in photoflow to test bugs and make arguments for controversial disscusions… I know what a low life, he he. But who knew, when all is lost…
In the meantime I had being editing and grading a film, so resumed my love for tinkering with colour, also was a good excuse for cleaning up and organizing my LUT’s cage. So with no expectations, with no objective in mind I played around a little more; enough to come to realize that (for me) this was a postcard, an image of a place I’ll probably never visit but yet somehow made it into my dull existence… like a postcard a friend would send me from an exotic corner of the earth. The resulting couple of images were a mixdown result of all this blabing =)
A more dramatic one, the someone lost a leg on the rice fields and gods just don’t care kind
A strange yet pleasent enough darkish mix (a pastel snapshot of a possible Apocalypse Now {one the greatest films ever made, linked with a great docu, a great book by Munch - blink - and of course London’s The Heart of Darkness} location) of a couple old home-brewed LUTs
4 Likes
Sorry for the late reply, i was really busy lately.
Thanks for all the great varaiations. It is intreresting to see how many people were reminded of some movies 
.
Furthermore it is relaxing to note that a cloudy picture remains a cloudy picture and this is valid for everybody and not just for me 
Some really nice contributions there that really like!
1 Like
quick attempt in just darktable
the weird halo around the horizon is from darktable masking
if I wanted to make this proper it would be done about like this with 2 outputs from darktable then
use gimp to get a proper horizon mask made to make sure a nice smooth transition exists between the 2 ‘exposures’
exposure bracketing at time of initial exposure would of been nice to capture the sky fully
included the darktable xmp file for reference
IMG_8936.CR2.xmp (4.5 KB)
Bit of an attempt to try and get what might have been seen - sky’s probably a bit light and I cloned out the burnt out part before brightening even more. This would probably turn out to be my first attempt on a shot like this.
IMG_8936.CR2.pp3 (10.3 KB)
John
Mk2 from the other one
Fotoxx to save using layers. Mid tone flatten, ramp to darken down the sky and yet another white balance on a cloud.
On this one I might decide I’d gone too far but knowing what I was going to do this time start again.
John
Somewhere in between the two would be nice. You might want to work on your masking technique.