I took this shot a couple of days ago on a dull, rainy day. I have tried my best to bring out the greens in the landscape and some texture in the clouds.
How would you process such a shot? I use DT
IMG_0096.CR3.xmp (75.4 KB)
4.2.0 on Windows 11.
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It looks to me like you met your goals very well.
ah, the Seattle palette 
As a rule of thumb, I start by desaturating the image globally ⌠then will use one or both of these modules to boost the greens:
color contrast: just grab the greens/magenta slider and boost. this example was taken all the way to 2.0
color zones: it helps here to use a mask, but find the most common green using the dropper tool, then adjust the saturation curve up, and tweak luminance to taste.
bonus: experiment with Velvia by toggling it on and off. just a little goes a long way to put vibrance and color back into the greens and reds if they suffered from the global desaturation.
I think the trick is to get the dark greens as realistic as possible, which will let wild brighter colors in the lighter greens pop and still seem believable. If the vegetation is very busy, sometimes it helps to use the color zones tool to boost the yellows as well to get more color contrast.
There are quite a few different approaches I might take depending on how much I care about color accuracy - but if the scene is mostly greens + grays, I find this works pretty well and is relatively quick.
For clouds, my first stop is the levels tool. I bring the white point in toward the left, then use slide the graypoint around until I begin to see definition. After that the contrast equalizer is useful. To get luminosity back into the sky after darkening it down, I tend to reach for the bloom module. Of course edits are all done to taste. I prefer to edit to get as natural of a scene as I can. This is a touch dark; could be boosted globally by about 0.25 EV.
IMG_0096.CR3.xmp (42.0 KB)
Thatâs a very display referred workflowâŚdo you use an older version of DT??
Not sure who youâre asking, but personally I donât think it makes a lick of difference for printing jpegs to sRGB which is the dominant distribution channel for photography over the web.
If thereâs some kind of sub-cult only using 20% of DTs features because theyâre afraid of irrevocably damaging colors they canât perceive and will never go to print, itâs not my problem.
You sound offendedâŚsorry just asking. Some of the modules are designed to work in concert with others⌠those who know what they are doing can for sure use any and all, mix and match, alter the pipeline order to suit what worksâŚNew users wonât even find the first step you mention so I was just askingâŚ
No offense taken, Iâm just old and full of rants, and this new fangled obsession with scene referred in stills editing is one of them.
I import on scene referred but have my modules filter set to show âall modulesâ when in Develop mode.
All good and Iâm pretty old too and prone to rants so fire away⌠I always think it good to check back in to be sure that my comments are not offensiveâŚnever meant to be⌠As old as I am I still have a whole boatload of things to learnâŚ
Sorry! Adding it right away.
Adding the license
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Thank you, but would there be a better way to do it?
I use version 4.2.0 which is just a tad older than the current one. I donât know about display referred and scene referred flows but I have set the menu the scene referred. But I do sometimes use non recommended modules; for example I find Shadows & Highlights better in some situations than the Tone Equalizer.
Thank you very much! Let me study how you have gone about it. I might have questions and I hope you will allow me time again.
I think one problem of this picture is, that there is a lot of noise in the picture, which gets emphasized if you want to bring in some textures. The reason is, that you shot it with ISO 2000. But there are no fast moving objects and i see no other reason for shutter speed 1/5000. So ISO 100 would have been the better choice. It would have brought more picture quality and therefore more possibilities to work out details and textures.
Regarding the processing: It was a dull rainy day. So I wouldnât try to let the green glow like on a sunny day. Thatâs how I would do it (there seems to be some dirt on your sensor, or the lens wasnât clean - I was too lazy to retouch this):
IMG_0096.CR3.xmp (19.2 KB)
dull-rainy-shot-IMG_0096_01.CR3.xmp (12.7 KB)
dt 4.4.2
youâre welcome. I moved from seattle to brittany so I know these skies well and have struggled with this exact problem for a long time!
Something that really pays off is to get very proficient at using the combination masking features in Darktable, as this is its real strength. For example, I suggested as a first step to desaturate everything - which really I should have said that we want to desaturate everything else except the greens, but I overlooked it trying to hurry.
To desaturate the image I used the global saturation slider in Color Balance RGB. The important bit about this module is that it makes edits in linear color space - which is a fancy way of saying that itâs more difficult to abuse the tool. Making a few subtle edits by masking off different parts of the image and duplicating this module to work on each section will tend to work out better than making an aggressive pull on a more âwildâ tool like the older saturation slider bar in the CSB module. Already the Color Balance RGB tool has a lot of granularity built into it, permitting one to make separate adjustments for shadows, midtones, and highlights. It is a very clever piece of software that is unique to DT.
Back to the mask:
Desaturating all of the other colors except our foreground greens should help to separate them just a bit. Before re-saturating them with the methods I first described, it would be helpful if we donât kill what color is already there.
Using the parametric mask first (the circular icon in the middle), go into the âhzâ - or hue - section of the JzCzhz color filters where we can select all the greens. Make sure you have the square icon selected to show the mask.
The top arrows set a hard mask, meaning that no colors will appear that are not between the arrows. If you lock the top and bottom arrows together and drag them inward, most often this is too harsh and will leave you with artifacts in the image after making adjustments. Thatâs what the bottom row is for, and adjusting the bottom row of arrows will feather off the selection so that we have a gradient in our selection and not a hard edge. (This works the same wherever the slider tool appears).
Here Iâve feathered it all the way back to the reds to preserve some of the color in the flora in the bottom right, but then constrained it heavily on the right side to suck out all of the blue tones from the sky.
You might ask why I didnât just go over the G tab of RGB: and the reason is that it we select the greens using only this tool, we will risk clipping the blues and reds attached to our foliage, which is undesirable. Likewise we could use the Gray sliders to select the tones - but on a gray day this will select big chunks of the sky, too! Hue tends to work out best for isolating foliage and trees. If there is a lot of tree bark showing, youâll want to let those left sliders include the yellows and orange huges as well to make sure theyâre selected.
This is looking pretty good, but now we want to refine the mask using the brush tool to eliminate all of the noise in the sky and the dam.
Using a fairly large brush, just select the bottom part of the mask that we want to keep. Iâve eliminated the valley floor in this instance to try and get contrast between the foreground and the desaturated valley; this is to taste, obviously! Your initial version with a verdant valley floor is a bit wild more my tastes but itâs also going in a nice direction.
Last masking step
You see in our selection that we have a lot of black dots. If our edits are aggressive, this can lead to bright lines between parts of the image that is masked and where it isnât - so to avoid this it is very important now to use feather radius to further smooth out the mask as a last step. I tend to be aggressive with the feathering radius. Here Iâve settled on ~ 90px. You can see that we now have some of our valley floor and a bit of the water selected, too.
This is not to worry: just select the line where we drew the mask and there you will see small squares. Click on the square closest to our overrun with the mask, and just pull it back. Another quick way to make the painted selection smaller is to hover over the line and while the squares are showing, then use your mouse wheel to increase or decrease the size of brush. This will save you a alot of time when masking.
Donât forget: each time you perfect a painted mask, it can be reused in any other module.
Final thought
The idea in this method is that we donât want the colors in the rest of the scene to compete against the foliage for attention, without having to over-saturate those tones to get them to stand out. If itâs raining or if the vegetation and foliage is wet, it will already be plenty saturated - especially with just a glimmer of sunlight. We want to add just a little bit without having the colors go wild and look unnatural. Every scene is different, and I never use presets preferring a basic approach like this to edit an image. The same settings donât work on every photograph.
If anyone else has tips or variations that work for them, Iâd be happy to hear it as well. hope this helps, cheers
Edit I think I deleted the original sidecar/edit but it can be retrieved using the jpg as a sidecar if anyone has any curiositiesâ
Boris did this video on CB module and the worked example was a mass of green foliage⌠might be some tips here for some people that have not seen itâŚ
Yeah, you could have used a bit more light on the sensor, and you had it available: 1/5000sec exposure at ISO 2000. No matter, got the imageâŚ
Hereâs what I get with rawproc. I know itâs not darktable, but I want to demonstrate what you can get in color with nothing more than manipulating the tone curve:
The hues are already there, and the standard color matrix for this camera produces them nicely. I did a screenshot so I could show the tone curve; essentially places where I made the curve steeper were where contrast is introduced, shallower parts of the curve do the opposite. Note that I put that shallow part where the least amount of image data is, between the dark land and lighter sky. In case the screenshot doesnât render well, hereâs the rendition:
Note that itâs low res, 800x534, thatâs a âpoor-manâsâ denoise⌠
