Fall colors are in full swing in Southern Colorado. I found myself on State Route 17 in the Conejos River valley, in the mid-afternoon with the sun brightly lighting the northern side. Well, the river was mostly south of the road, so I found myself shooting toward the sun. But y’know, that’s where it turned out the most interesting lighting was, back-lighting the foliage and making nice long-ish shadows, not to mention the glint off the river. I offer one of my captures for messing-with, along with a JPEG rendition with no processing other than the export tone curve:
The magenta in the river glint is the white balance-shifted saturation piles. The exposure was calculated by my camera’s hightlight-weighted matrix mode, which you see doesn’t protect all highlights; I’m loving it more every day. I’ll post my ‘decent’ rendition later; want to see what you all will do with more sophisticated software…
Probably should have used some chromatic aberration on the right. Ah well. I’m sure others will handle the highlights better than me - not my forte. Lovely scene. Tried to emphasize the blue water.
This image is lovely…you could color grade it many ways for sure… offering one I landed on but likely I would be different if I started again from scratch
@hannoschwalm , I noticed something about highlight reconstruction you might be interested in. Sampling an area within the main blown part, LCh gave a white value - (405,405,405), whereas Segmentation gave (518,315,373). However it didn’t look as pink as those numbers suggest to me. But it was noticeably different in colour. This was with very few modules enabled.
Wow, nice edits, all. @ejm, I think you hit the nail on the head for monochrome, I often find such backlit foliage lends a compelling bit of airy-ness to the image.
Here’s my edit. With my SSF profile for the camera, then, in order, a touch of HSL saturation, HL recovery, a standard filmic curve, then resize and sharpen for export to a sRGB JPEG:
I find the highlight-weighted metering in the Z 6 does just what I want to glint and in-scene illumination - lets it go. Then, if there are unblown channels in a particular pixel, librtprocess’s highlight_recovery() routine re-paints them with an appropriate color. All works together quite well for my purposes…
Thanks for the kind encouragement. Black and white is both incredibly liberating and quite limiting - all at the same time. Having grown up with it, I can’t seem to get it out of my system.
Like Ginger Rogers having to do what Fred Astaire did… but backwards in heels.
Maybe Let that glint go should be a new Nikon slogan…
I appreciate your economy but I think you could scale down a bit less and give us “more”…tongue in cheek there but on my monitor your preview is fairly small I think you could go HD resolution and the image would still be small enough but a nice size for preview…
EDit…say for a random post say in this case Andrew’s I would get this and could also zoom to compare details
Yeah, I’m feeling compelled to rethink 800x600. I do know the size of the rendition in native pixels because that’s how rawproc displays them, but for some reason Window Photos thinks that’s 200%. I still want to do small-sized “proof” prints, easy to ship around the internets and it protects my IP, somewhat. Just need to pick a size that satisfies most viewers.
