Basically I’m looking for a way to do this in Darktable or possibly RawTherapee so I can ditch LR b/c that’s the one and only app that I need Windows for, everything else is on Linux and everything else seems to work good enough or better in Darktable except hdr x|
If you want example xmp files, post a photo that needs an HDR treatment.
By default RawTherapee has the exposure module enabled, which makes auto adjustments. Darktable has no such thing. For a fair comparison, reset the exposure module in RawTherapee.
@paperdigits you’re right, once I’ve set tone curve to linear it was pretty much the same brightness. However I was not referring to that being an issue in that example but rather the countless artifacts in the image.
For a quick and dirty edit, I’d try to use exposure + filmic + tone curve. In filmic, start with a preset, then tweak the middle grey luminance. Also, if you get strange colors, disable preserve chroma, and readjust extreme luminance saturation to your taste.
This is from memory.
Guys, you’re awesome!
I literally can’t believe this was solved so quickly and with such an amazing results both in DT and RT.
I’ll probably be back with more questions as I move my workflow to DT but for now I think that I have everything that I need and that it works (as far as my testing so far) so I’m ditching LR effective immediately.
One observation, Darktable seems to be quite technical. Don’t change it. I’ve been editing for quite a few years and never thought about how the underlying thing actually works and that seems to be the reason why I was stuck now. I’m excited to learn it all now
Hmm, I could have sworn I saw something about the sliders in RT DRC not doing anything, one thing to keep in mind (this was the topic of some recent discussion on RT’s UI) - it’s possible to adjust a module’s sliders when the module is still turned off.
Also RT has at least two different approaches to tonemapping, one is literally called tonemapping, the other is Dynamic Range Compression - I personally prefer the DRC tool.
In case you are open to other possibilities, here is what I could achieve with PhotoFlow. The starting point is a TIFF file produced with RT and the “neutral” profile, because I have just noticed that PhotoFlow suffers from the same artifacts as DT when reading the HDRmerge DNG.
FYI PhotoFlow processes the image using layers (instead of the modules of DT and RT), and is therefore closer to Photoshop and GIMP. The whole processing is non-destructive, and layers can be associated with opacity masks for local adjustments.
Here is what I could achieve in about 30’, trying to get close to your final result (I’m not totally satisfied by the way the sky turned out):
If you want to open the pfi file, you will need a version of photoflow from today or newer. For Linux you can use this AppImage package. Just make it executable and run it.
