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.
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.
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…
Thanks for the images, came in handy for testing stuff. For reference here’s what I got with dcraw + gmic simple tone curve for one of them (no other tweaks):
What problems do you have with the sky? Sky in your version looks pretty good.
Exactly.
Here is my version. It’s similar to yours, with less contrast, softer textures and a little color grading to better separate green trees from orange-yellow ones:
The second photo, in the given light, doesn’t make much sense to me. The road with trees as the main motif in the foreground are in deep shadow in contrast to the very strongly lit background. It would be much better the other way around.
Thanks Steven! No I did not find these buttons before. Where is it explained in the manual?
At least I found now how to write $(WIDTH.SENSOR)x$(HEIGHT.SENSOR) in special topics → variables in order to see a pictures original size.
Best regards, Andreas
Thanks, it was a quick and dirty interpretation though, on your part you really nailed it, I mean fulfilled the request I think. You’re on a roll lately !
I loaded your sidecar file to take a look at how you tempered all these harsh small details / high frequency contrasts and added what I saw to my tool list ! thanks for the lesson, as always