Hello I am nube to Darktable and beginner to digital photography
I took these two shots recently of two landscape. One is a kind of rolling English Hills
and the other one was interesting because of the what looked like smoke rising. Yes they are a bit basic and boring
What can be done to jazz them up a bit. The JPEG has the sky all blown out !
I know a badly taken picture cannot be corrected on post processing, specifically the composition
Any quick edits by people very proficient at this would be welcomed
Hi rc and welcome!
Here’s my version of one of your files. In case you don’t know already, ou can apply my .xmp file via the “load history stack” module in the lighttable view, set to “overwrite” mode. Very handy. Make a duplicate first to preserve your edit if you want.
Anyway, I mostly added a lot of contrast and color using sigmoid, sharpness using diffuse or sharpen, and some color tweaks in color calibration. Oh, and also used tone EQ to lighten the landscape. I had mixed feelings about the crop, as it lost the aeroplane, but I felt it improved the composition…
Thanks for sharing these photographs. Not Darktable but GIMP.
For both, colour boost and local adjustments to saturation and brightness. Then I decided that a crop would emphasise the panoramic aspect and focus attention on the landscape.
I thought I liked the first image more (P3190363), but after having played with them, I definitely love the second one more (P3190286). It gives me a sense of meditative calm and relax: light and dark are fighting among the clouds in the sky, but that battle going on upstairs, instead of creating chaos in its ground level repercussion, gives life to delicate harmonies of colors.
Probably not the best edit I have done in my life, but I chose to make a dark and stormy looking sky and brighten the village a little to lift it out of the gloom by using a separate exposure instance with a mask. I also did a color zones module masked to the smoke to lift the brightness of the smoke. P3190363.ORF.xmp (26.6 KB)
A superfast edit where I cropped the image to make it more about the train travelling through the landscape. I chose the sigmoid module because it worked easiest with this image. A little bit of color balance module to add saturation to colors, shadow and highlights module and some local contrast and sharpening with the diffuse or sharpen module. P3190286.ORF.xmp (11.7 KB)
Thanks, Really I just cranked a lot of sliders and added more with fake colours (colour cast with colour balance RGB) on certain spots using drawn masks
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