Nice shot too.
Adjusting the white balance in color calibration was interesting - the cast of those streetlights is quite extreme, but I ended up with a result I liked.
I use the sigmoid workflow (as @Terry mentioned above) purely out of personal preference.
FWIW, my workflow generally goes something like:
Exposure
Sigmoid contrast
Color calibration for white balance.
Crop/straighten if needed.
Color grading in color balance rgb
Denoise
Sharpen using a preset in diffuse and sharpen.
Not at all necessarily in that order - darktable has a (normally) fixed pipeline order of operations so it makes no difference what order I do things in.
If you’re interested, here’s a screen capture of me processing your image. No commentary or anything like that, but you can see how I approach it to some extent.
Edit: I expect you know this, but you can use this button to load other’s .xmp sidecar files if you want to see module setting and so on. Make a duplicate with the button a few rows up first if you want to keep your edit.
I chose to crop for a portrait orientation, because to me the illuminated signs on the left and the shop window on the right distracted from the story that I saw: the cyclist, the pedestrian and the tram in convergence with lamplit snowfall atmospherics.
FWIW, here’s my take in ART (not darktable). I couldn’t find any good reference point for WB so I just eyeballed it as well as possible given all the mutli-colored artificial lighting. From a more artistic angle I tried to emphasize (what I took to be) the story of the image – The cyclist delivering food (?) in the cold night. Somehow my edit looks much later in the evening, to my eyes.
I decided to choose the 16:9 format because it makes the scene appear much wider, which enhances the impression of the wide road with the cyclist in the foreground. This also includes the additional diffusion, which on the one hand calms the details in the background a little, so that the viewer can concentrate more on the cyclist and on the other hand, it gives the whole scene a softer foggy impression of a wintry snowy evening.
As for the colors, I kept the warm tone of the scene and with the help of channel mixer in the second instance of the color calibration module, I unified the cold and neutral tones in a subtle cyan tone, so that they contrast a little against the dominating warm tone of the scene.
Just a note: I use the developer version of darktable and in this case also the new version of the sigmoid module. So I’m afraid that the sidecar file won’t help much here.
I think this is an excellent photograph.
The colour temperature I believe is OK. My guess is that the street lights are high-pressure sodium (natrium).
I have cropped the illuminated signs on the left and a crop at the bottom to make the cyclist the main feature. I have tried to emphasise the falling snow and the snow on the ground.
This is my interpretation, but other interpretations are equally valid!
Thank you Sakari. I’m glad you like it. I am preparing a new episode about diffusion and soft look and this photo came in handy. The scene has a nice composition.
I tried to keep my edit “natural”. I believe the tones are warm because of the street lights, but I also like some of the others’ cooler edits because of the ice and snow. dt 4.4.2
This is a very nice shot, and I love the different versions. There are the mistier ones (I vote for @s7habo 's version there, but all of them are good), and also those where the snow is shown backlit by the street lamp, with a completely different feel to it (severe weather vs man), with the crops from @martin.scharnke and @123sg being my personal favourites. I think the tighter crop also makes the approaching tram somehow more sinister and menacing (even though the tracks tell us it won’t hit the delivery guy).
Most edits went for a warm look and I think it fits good. I Really like the version from @s7habo, indeed very cinematic.
As always I like to provide something new, so I went for a really cold look and I think it works also.
- darktable has a (normally) fixed pipeline order of operations so it makes no difference what order I do things in.
