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.
I warmed the white balance, raised the new Shadow Rolloff Point, reduced the film area, raised Drama to 100, nudged the black clipping point, reduced the white clipping point slightly, reduced the shadow brightness a bit, and increased vibrance and reduced saturation in opposition to emphasize the brighter colors more and neutralize the neutral colors.
I don’t count myself as experienced in or knowledgeable about those topics or photography or post-processing in general, but as you seem to be after feedback I do have a couple of observations on your result.
The ridge which is in the centre of the frame is darker than the rest of the mountain face which is nearer. This creates an unnatural look, being in opposition to natural haze, especially when considering how bright the buildings this side of the mountain (behind the setting sun) are.
Dark ridge tops are often created as a result of gray grads used on skies, and I think they should be avoided if at all possible. I used a graduated density for the sky and managed to avoid darkening the mountain with a parametric mask, only allowing the darkening to apply to tones above a certain lightness.
The surface of the water is brighter than the sky, which is the wrong way round and so also looks unnatural.
Regarding the shot itself, one thing I noticed is that there was plenty of scope to shoot at a lower ISO with a longer exposure time to avoid noise. Instead of 1/1000th of a second at 1600 ISO, 1/250th of a second at 400 ISO should help quite a bit.
I hope this helps, but it’s all secondary to you having captured a great scene!
I’ve only used the retouch module in a very basic way and haven’t learnt about its ‘scales’ and ‘algorithms’, but here’s how it can be used to remove spots.
Gave it a whack in Darktable 3.0 RC2 and RawTherapee. I’m still learning my way around RawTherapee so don’t let me edit reflect the quality of that software. I’m barely beyond the “what’s this button do” stage.
The luminance Y setting on preserve chrominance option seemed to give the best result on the hihglights to my eye. I used the retouch module to get rid of the dust specs and that blob.
RawTherapee edit just for the heck of it and because I’m trying to learn it. Exported to GIMP for use of the healing tool on the spots as RawTherapee doesn’t have local editing yet.
I’ve been having better luck out of RT on the highlight reconstruction side as of late but I think I prefer DT’s color reproduction. Could just be down to familiarity with the tool! Couldn’t quite squeeze the same “pop” out of the buildings in RT yet.
Hey David thanks a lot for the v. useful comments! Looking back at my edit – you’re right, I guess I had overused the tone equalizer and didnt’ pay attention to what the real thing was. Since I’m always after a realistic look, I think that tone equalizer would be rather dangerous in my hands unless I take mental note of how the tonalities in the real world are; in most of my other edits in fact I use a simpler tone curve or rgb curve where I work on the scene in its entirety. I used to do dodge and burn in lightroom mostly for street photography where I think it’s less important to maintain a realistic look.
About the choice of shooting parameters, well that was entirely my mistake and yes, I should’ve decreased the ISO (I was walking back up the mountain with the camera on, it was getting dark very quickly so I simply left the camera on 1600 just in case and then looking back at the scene I took some photos of the beautiful landscape without thinking too much about ISO…).
That is the latest “official” release, but I strongly advise you to use instead the nightly builds that you can find here. I am preparing a new release for the beginning of next year, but meanwhile the nightly builds are definitely better, more stable and have much more features than v0.2.8.
The tool shouldn’t matter, as long as you have the vision.
