[PlayRaw] - The castle's on fire

Processing
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The backstory
Last autumn I went out to take some picture’s on a hill around the city at sunset. It was not the standard photo spot for our city and once I was there I understood why: Ugly things in the front, which make wide panoramic shots a little…ugly.
So instead of doing the big panoramas I took out my Tele and took some “close up” pictures of the city from afar. The results were quite ineresting, because you never really see those sites from close up and from that angle. One those interesting shots was of our castle, one of the two most photographed things here, which I have never seen from this angle.

Why this for PlayRaw
Because it looks interesting in high contrast (as the out of camera jpg was) and it also can be manipulated to make more things visible. Plus it is a little challenging, because of the high contrast. And finally we’ve never had anarchitecture shot in a PlayRaw (though this isn’t reaaaalllyyy an architecture shot either, but at least there’s a building!)

So I went the high manipulation road. Did the basic development in RT. Exported as Tiff to Gimp made the highlights in the trees in front of the castle more visible. Sent it back as Tiff to RT, scaled it down and sharpened.
Here’s the result and below you can find the raw:

3240×2157 1.19 MB

IMG_3093.CR2 (16.7 MB)
Creative Commons License
The castle’s on fire is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

3 Likes
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Changed the colour of the sky so that the castle (not the sky) is on fire and accentuated the castle colour and recovered a bit of highlights from the left side of the castle. Oh yeah, a bit of crop to get rid of the street light on the right side.

4130×2315 2.34 MB

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This was tough… I tried to go with a “dramatic” look that puts emphasis on the castle, and not so much on the trees. Here’s my result (in RawTherapee)

1920×1278 339 KB

Thanks for sharing! I had fun :slight_smile:

1 Like
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here’s my try :slight_smile:

2048×1363 464 KB

castle.pp3 (11.7 KB)

1 Like
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Thanks for sharing this shot and RAW file.

2000×956 302 KB

IMG_3093.CR2.xmp (8.0 KB)

I’ve made the castle colour slightly warmer, and toned down the saturation in the highly-lit area on the left. I also attempted a slightly dreamy look with Darktable’s soften module (Orton effect).

I like the colour definition/contrast that you have for the trees in your version.

1 Like
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@shreedhar, @agriggio, I like your idea to change the skys color as it sets the castle more into the foreground.
@age nice colors on the trees.
@DavidOliver, I do like that Orton effect!

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I agree about the dreamy look of @DavidOliver, really nice! any idea how to do it with rawtherapee?

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What a difficult shot :grinning:.
DT only.

4661×3069 6.17 MB

IMG_3093.CR2.xmp (15.8 KB)