Summer by the sea


DSCF3938.RAF.xmp (17.9 KB)

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Playing with color balance rgb (a bit trial-and-error). On reflection, the greens maybe a bit lurid.

DSCF3938.RAF.xmp (24.5 KB)

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One of the reasons the photos may look underexposed is the tone curve applied in-camera. That is, two cameras, with the same settings, both shots being carefully exposed to avoid overexposure may appear to have different brightness: while ‘white’ may be equally bright in both, the midtones could appear different. A camera maker may decide to underexpose (avoiding highlight clipping), and use a tone curve that compensates for that. It has been observed that most Fuji shots need about +2.5 EV in exposure to bring the midtones to the correct exposure level; the default in darktable is 1.5 EV, I think, but I usually use +2 EV for my shots (not a Fuji camera, probably a matter of taste).

In darktable, with the scene-referred workflow, you use exposure to get your midtones properly exposed, then use tone equalizer, filmic and possibly color balance rgb to tune highlights and shadows. Remember that filmic is midtone-centric: the tone mapping curve it generates does not touch midtones (leaves them as bright in the output as they were in the input). By default it uses a mid-grey point of 18.45%, but you can change that by enabling the custom grey slider on the advanced tab (even though that is not recommended).

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DSCF3938-2.jpg.out.pp3 (14,4 KB)


DSCF3938.RAF.xmp (84.7 KB)

Noisier than a Merzbow concert :slightly_smiling_face:

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Quite a challenging shot, plus my (bad) habit of not using parametric mask except for graduated density and sharpening :sweat:


DSCF3938.RAF.xmp (16.2 KB)
dt 3.7.0

Thanks for sharing!