For colour comparison, here a shot from the same area (~5 km distance) shot in May 2008. The colour of heckflosse in the picture is very close to its real colour
Yes, it is! I also followed your route. First a long time lurker/reader and a little over a year ago I joined and became an active participant.
I’m rather hesitant to use a (google or other) street view image as baseline for colours (et al). You must have noticed that there are some really strange things going on in the screen-grab you posted. Besides that, we don’t know anything about how it was taken, compression, post processing (if any) and the likes.
The light (Sun) in your image is heads-on, so there’s a decent amount of glare and as a result the colours are less saturated. How much is a question that I think will remain open, but as I mentioned when posting my edit: I do think I overdid the saturation somewhat.
About “cutting the image in half”. Not sure if you looked at my sidecar, but I did use a graduated filter to separate sky from the rest.
I’m not sure you should apply 2 different white balance values though. RawTherapee has some nice tools to target individual areas:
- Colour Toning
This module can use masks based on Hue and/or Chroma an/or Luminance and can use multiple instances. I used 2 masked instances in my edit. A very powerful module which can also be used for colour grading/toning (using one of the first 3 methods).
- Local Adjustments
This section is not available yet in the official stable version. You need to build RT yourself or grab this, slightly older development appimage.
A very powerful module that can target just about any part of an image and then use most of the tools available in RT. It is already part of the on-line doc: RawPedia Local Adjustments
@heckflosse: Nice cars. Especially the one in front! I backpacked through that area. Ireland is a bit to broad to do by foot to be honest, but man is it beautiful.
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Yes, it’s very beautiful. I drove along the coast all around Ireland and also through some central parts with the car in the back 
Wow … an old DKW! Is this your Heckflosse?
No, the Mercedes is my Heckflosse. I met the DKW by accident on Slea Head Drive. That was really cool 
@heckflosse I was first confussed thinking you are refering to yourself in third person but now it makes sense. shame on me that I dont know my local cars 
I’m rather hesitant to use a (google or other) street view image as baseline for colours (et al).
Yes that is correct. But maybe some can derive some comparison by viewing a lot of comparable shots. Since the n will equal out the differing camera settings (in theory). When looking at the dozens of images of this spot (Google Maps) it seems that the rocks are more brownish with direct sunlight and more blueish with clouds in the air. So maybe most of the interpretations are onto something.
The light (Sun) in your image is heads-on, so there’s a decent amount of glare and as a result the colours are less saturated.
Thanks for this. I did not know that lens flare affects colors and saturation. This seems quite plausible to be the issue why most of you myself included find it quite difficult to process.
I will have a look at your proposed techniques and maybe try Art, Luminosity Masks in Darktable or the special RawTherapee Branch later on.
I expressed myself a bit confusing. Thinking of Mercedes and typing only DKW 
The question should have been “Is the car in the background your Heckflosse?”
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I’m not like Caesar 
Looks like there was movement between the shots.
Anyway, I used dcraw to extract the previews and did a simple fusion, local contrast and brightness adjustment using gmic but sorry the forum won’t let me upload the result. It is too ugly. 
Permission denied - timeout
Looks like there was movement between the shots.
I believe - all my hdrs are handheld. When its bright most of the time it works well also with low iso. It seems hdrmerge will auto-allign images while darktable will not.
Anyway, I used
dcrawto extract the previews and did a simple fusion, local contrast and brightness adjustment usinggmicbut sorry the forum won’t let me upload the result.
Sounds interesting - there must be a way. You can upload it for this spot on google maps 
I played with the color mask in ART with some good good results for seperation but I have still to work on it.
@Suki2019
I like this outcome. I opened the hdrmerge image via darktable and loaded the sidecar file from you. But unfortunately it looks different (I also use 3.4.1.1). Any idea what the problem could be?
The history seemed to load correctly.
maybe something is wrong in the hitory in the *jpg
attached the *.xmp
Seaside street against the sun - Rawtherapee & Darktable-DSC02763-02765_HDRMerge.dng.xmp (15.2 KB)
@Suki2019
Thank you. Now it works. Lots of things to unpack for me since I am new to darktable. I will play a little bit and try to come up with my own version.
Since uploading works now, I will share with you a minimalist take. The key is to make a good mask. Mine still has room for improvement.
1 hdrmerge for ghosting. 2 photoflow for raw dev. 3 gmic for masking and brightness adjustment between the fore and backgrounds. (3.1 Cheated a little: gimp to fill in holes and make stronger mask. Could have done it all in gmic but don’t have the processing power.)
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Merged in Gimp using this plugin http://tir.astro.utoledo.edu/jdsmith/code/exposure_blend.php
Edited in RawTherapee Dev. Using whole image Local Adjustments to separate shadows midtones and highlights.
DSC02763-3.jpg.out.pp3 (21.0 KB)
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