Hi, how would you edit these two photos? I have a lot of issues with the sky. It’s not necessary for the sky to be too bluish and saturated.
DSCF3221.RAF (32.1 MB)
DSCF1914.RAF (32.1 MB)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
not too saturated sky ? ok !
I went for the sur-real approach, the high frequency contrasts/details in the trees branch and needles really are disturbing
Hi I’d also go for this with slightly different mask. Stupid question: what is the reason for obtaining the sharp bright edge when underexposing strongly:
Or zoomed:
On the right side of picture is sun so this dark variants are not realistic. Picture is taken in autumn time when larch get this gold colour.
Beside realism:
The bright line comes from details threshold. Switching it back to 0 (respectively 1) one achieves this:
By the way when trying drawn and parametric mask to get additional control over the left top corner the program crashed. As well as it once crashed when using many sharp corners to follow the trees.
Best regards, Andreas
Here as export:
There are still some flaws in which maybe easily could get fixed by a better mask. Is there a possibility to later add points, both round and with corners?
Best regards
Andreas
Great images. 
I wonder where these were taken…
Here’s my two attempts, using darktable 4.5 (should load in 4.6 I believe).
I used sigmoid. I like the way skies come out usually.
On the second I struggled with the dynamic range - I ended up using a graduated mask with a second instance of exposure. I prefer your version of the second one I think.
Edit: I loaded your history stack from the jpeg to have a look. A quick tweak in filmic improves the sky quite a lot I think…
Hi Andreas,
with the sort of mask you have drawn I would feather and blur the edges (I can’t see your sliders for this in the screenshot) to provide an invisible transition. I also use the detail slider for isolating or avoiding detail so when sharpening or denoising images and would never see a use for that slider with an exposure issue (hence the improvement when you returned it to zero).
I have not finished my edit for this image because I wanted to show what the tone equalizer module could do with balancing the exposure issues in this shot. I didn’t use any masking and I didn’t even touch the exposure module. This would give us a good starting point and we could tweak color, contrast, saturation after this step. The tone equalizer is certainly capable of heavy lifting with this shot.
Interesting. Looking good. I didn’t actually use any tone eq or masking on this shot - I considered it a perfect dynamic range as-is.
I’d be interested to see how you handle the second shot. I found it a challenge…! 
Tone equalizer really behaves good. When using a slightly different setting the mountains in the back get darker
How much light did the mointains in the back have? I’d assume most of them in the shadow, with the light coming somewhere from the right and slightly from the front.
Best regards, Andreas
PS: I still struggle with how to tell darktable to take the xmp files I want it to take for whatever reason… …just stopping and copying does not always work, whyever.
First one is from Slovenia (part of Karawanks mountain range).
Second one is from France (Auvergne region).
Really nice version of both photos and a promising slider in filmic module which I did not know.
Yes it was challenging. First I set exposure on the brightest section of the image and then I chased shadow recovery options. I didn’t want to over brighten the shadows.
I feel like you have taken the image background way darker than it likely was. Nothing wrong with that… but I think it also dramatically changes the lighting and the way the sun coming from the right would light the scene…
Are you using the buttons in lighttable? They’re often overlooked…
Make a duplicate first if you want to keep your own edit.
A little apocalyptic perhaps. 
Impressive.
