Basically, except for rotate and perspective, every module you see in my edit is part of my default module chain. From that chain I actively work on filmic (for global contrast and handling highlight as needed), color balance (for saturation, color temps, and obviously color stuff) and tone eq (adjusting shadows / highlights). All other modules I have set up their default settings once which I hardly ever change.
So, the tone eq is one of my main go-to everday tools. Even though you could do more with it, I only use it to boost dark areas and darken brighter ones (e.g. you could also use it for contrast stuff).
My setting for filter diffusion and edges refinement/feathering just turned out to work well for me over the time. I was aiming for settings that preserve contrast in the processed areas and avoid halos on high contrast edges as good as possible for me. I’m quite satisfied with what I get from these settings with hardly no need to ever change them.
The mask exposure compensation and mask contrast compensation are stuff you will always have to set up based on the actual photo. You want this histogram to fit in the -8 +0 space.
You don’t want something like this:
See the bright peak at the right border.
Now, the rest in the advance tab is just brighten or darken the different areas of lightness of the photo. In this case, the settings are pretty much extreme since there is some extreme lighting situation in this photo. So that I even made a second instance of tone eq which is not that common.
Yeah, I was wondering about why there were two instances. Thanks for the explanation, I’ll surely be experimenting with it, as the ‘shadows and highlights’ module is not giving the results I want, and is not fine-grained enough either.
I exported the edit, then added some details in Gimp by copying part of the sky, applying a high pass-filter and blending it with the merge grain option, then I just adjusted a bit the brightness in RT again using local edits (there’s still a bit of a halo though, hard to nail it perfectly).
Mine is a bit along the lines of @jonathanBieler and @ggbutcher 's edits… all done in DT… could mess with the yellow in the sky a bit to bump or further desaturate it to taste I guess…
I think I just used the colorfulness and brightness sliders in CC module for a quick tweak. They can be awesome for just pumping up or in this case knocking down a bit channel based color properties without having to go in to full on channel mixer mode…
This is a challenging image that could be processed in multiple ways. The tome equalizer is very important with an image like this. There are some YouTube videos on it if you are not familiar with this essential module.
