Having a problem knocking down the very bright specks (sun reflection in surface tension of water) in this photo, without wierd artifacts or discoloration in adjecent areas. Either darktable isnt the right tool, or I am really bumbling something. Anyone have the fix? Maybe GIMP, or similar pixel pusher, would be a better tool?
This photo is licensed under BY-NC-SA
Retouch module works well for this. This is just a very quick job and could be done a lot better with more time, but it should give you an idea of how to do it. The trick is to align the source with the countours of the corrected sections. I didn’t apply the healing brush, but it helps to smooth out any weirdness.
I try to always do what I can in camera, and that just makes life easier. And here a circular polarizer would’ve likely been helpful.
I assume your using agx build? I get black screen until I reset demosaic, but then the spots show back up…along with dark circular surrounds. EDIT: I see your using PPG as the demos. I will switch things up and see if I can get results like your jpg
And that is the same issue I had under dt 5.2.1. I tried using the heal tool after a round of cloning, but it just smears unwanted colors/tones into the mix.
I hear you…woulda shoulda coulda. Now I am stuck doing what I can to remedy a lack of gear.
One thing I’ve tried with some positive outcome is using the color look up table to select the highlight with the dropper tool and lower the brightness and saturation…but the drawback is that can also impact the remaining whites in the photo if the colors too closely match.
An attempt in GIMP to make the reflections less obvious. Done on my tiny laptop, so difficult to assess the effectiveness of the result.
I tried my luck with RapidRAW. It did a remarkable job using the in built AI tools. Quite impressive
PS: missed out on a couple of spots
Surprised! Despeckle in GIMP got rid of most of it
Is there a way to rotate the source? To get the curvature of the leaves.
Maybe use a parametric mask only selecting the highlights for this - maybe you’ll need to add a rough path to further select only the desired specks…
Sorry, I should have mentioned the build I had used.
@Tamas_Papp - I’m not aware of any way to rotate the source, but that sure would come in handy.
I would not be very much bothered by those speck’s. But since you’ve asked I experimented a bit. What happened is that I overshoot a little bit and get grey speck’s. So I turned down both used modules to 80%. The effect is modest but no disturbing dark halo’s. Hope you like it.
What I used: dt 5.3.0+169~g06f0b0b576 + AGX
What I did:
demosaic: capture sharpen 14 iterations
denoise: profiled
exposure: first instance: only masked specular highlighs, no action
exposure: second instance: standard no alterations
color calibration: first instance: set to flowers’ petals
color calibration: second instance: removed a bit of bluish haze only in mask area’s
agx: experimented with settings only using agx in masked area
No further modules used for this edit. Normally I would surely use color balance rgb and diffuse or sharpen as well.
Important in both modules to set the mask’s advanced curve param’s as you like, they have a big influence.
Kind regards, Jetze
As an old time photographer of too many years I expect specular highlights of the sun reflecting off the water to be just that. Why do you want to dull then down or color them in? The sun is bright and this is a time expect pure white pixels. This is my literally ten second edit. The specular highlights add to the images beauty in my view. If its not broken don’t fix it would be my suggestion.
_DSC4229.ARW.xmp (9.2 KB)
I am mostly in agreement with you @Terry ! I am acting on the advice of others, for whom the bright spots were “distracting”.
There is one spot where I think it really does need to happen: the Pac-Man vampire to the right of the flower…once it was pointed out to me, I couldnt unsee it 
Maybe I should fix some of the worst offenders, especially if they are the “easy” ones to hide, and leave the rest.
Thanks everyone! Your edits have given me some ideas to try.
@AdamFromCanada I never thought to try the lookup table. Thats an intriguiing suggestion. Perhaps mixed in with heal/clone…
Would very much like to see what your final result and processing looks like…!
I have not used GIMP much. It was too confusing when I first started processing images, and then I was able to do most everything I want in darktable.
I am trying to learn the basics right now, but I will give despeckle a try once I wrap my head around layers + masks…and how to navigate the panels. Is there a module/filter/whatever that you find does a better job than despeckle?
