One of my first successful attempts at using filmic+tone equalizer. I’m posting it here to know how others would process it and if my filmic/tone eq./color balance settings are reasonable according to the more experienced among you.
Also, there’s a big blotch to the left that I haven’t corrected because, well, I haven’t got around to understanding how retouching works in DT!
processed in darktable 3.0.0rc0~git116.733fc5d97; shot with a Fuji XT-2 and 35mm f/2; location is Positano, on the tyrrhenian coast south of Naples, Italy.
First I worked on the sky and tried a second masked instance of the filmic module for the hills but I failed. Then I made a duplicate of the image and made two different exposures.
Thanks everyone! Great to see all sort of different takes on this photo. A few observations:
I’ve noticed most of you have increased the overall brightness quite a lot, a bit too much considering the actual time of the day this photo has been taken. My final version is much darker overall because that’s what I remember.
I have only loaded the xmp to Darktable for a couple of your takes and noticed you haven’t bothered about noise reduction. I suppose it’s because we can only compare and assess the overall colors from the smaller jpeg we’re sharing on here. That’s ok of course but I have realized that maybe I shouldn’t obsess too much about noise at 100% if my usual prints are very rarely up to A4 size.
I particularly like how @anon41087856 and @agriggio have rendered the sky. I’m trying to learn how to use the new color balance in DT to try and reproduce what he’s done (Aurelien; Alberto doesn’t use DT so how he got that lovely sky is not something I’ll be able to “study”).
so many good renditions now that I scroll back up! I like the b/w version too, that was a bold decision considering all the nice colors waiting to be pulled out.
another bold version: the hazed one by @afre! I liked that. Wouldn’t know how to reproduce it on DT though, but that’s not probably my idea of processing (I mean radically changing the environment).
Decided to go in the opposite direction. Everyone likes the bright colourful high contrast image. The tool shouldn’t matter, as long as you have the vision.
I have started from @paulmiller’s version, and tried to better emphasize the town and the sky (sky still not as good as @anon41087856 and @agriggio could achieve). I have also tried to keep a consistent color tone on the whole picture, adding some red to the buildings to enhance the sunset mood.
Note for anyone using the .pfi: there seems to be a bug in loading path based masks - I have a local contrast layer masked to the sky, but on loading the .pfi it gets applied to the whole image. Opening up the mask layer and clicking ‘invert’ twice fixes this.
The tool shouldn’t matter, as long as you have the vision.
