Summer sunset in the valley of Cadore

Hi!
I participated in a lot of Play Raw challenges and it is time for me to give back some fun.
I took this picture last summer during a nice sunset in the valley of Cadore in Italy.
I struggled to obtain an image that conveys my perception of that moment. I am trying to capture the incipient darkness of the night and the warmly lit mountains peaks.
Let’s see what you will do!

Here is the RAW file, licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
DSCF8770.RAF (18.3 MB)

And here is a first attempt with darktable 3.4. It looks quite dark now that I see it in the forum, but I like it when judged in the ISO 12646 color assessment conditions of darktable.


DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (13.0 KB)

For reference this is the OOC JPEG, using the Velvia film simulation of my X100F.

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Darktable 3.4 DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (6,6 KB)

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Don’t like the wire hanging over the left part of the image but I’m too lazy to mask it )))

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DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (13.1 KB)

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The main challenge, and IMHO primary boon, of morning shooting is the dynamic range. Nicely exposed image, a lot to work with.

I spent a bit of time on the tone curve, putting the shadows in their appropriate places. That sun on the peaks deserves color attention, so I added a bit of HSL saturation. A crop to put the village in a place where it got more attention, and there you go. In rawproc:

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valley.of.cadore.pp3 (24.0 KB) RawTherapee 5.8-2770-gbae2231ac

Nice shot!

Not sure if I get your meaning about the darkness and night. If I look at the metadata I see that this was shot at 18:40 on August 21st which is late afternoon/early evening.

EDIT: Interesting how your eyes start to compensate while you edit; Did not see the slight haloing around the mountains (left side). Even now if I look at it for a few seconds it looks to disappear…

Made a second edit:


valley.of.cadore-1.pp3 (17.0 KB) RawTherapee 5.8-2770-gbae2231ac

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That’s my error; the OP states specifically this was a sunset shot. I’m just a morning person, I guess… :laughing:

@ggbutcher: ROFL I wasn’t talking to you, the remark was meant for @arctic

That was typically me; Living in my own chaotic headspace :crazy_face:

Thanks for posting, nice picture
DT 3.4.0


DSCF8770_01.RAF.xmp (12.8 KB)

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My offering:

DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (17.8 KB)

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very nice shot! here’s my version with vkdt. logarithmic shaper + a bit of contrast, heckflosse’s deconvolution/sharpen, and used a custom noise profile created from only this image and applied wavelet denoising based on that:

here’s the processing graph vkdt.txt (2.6 KB)
and fwiw here’s the raw histogram with noise estimates and fitted curve:

edge avoiding wavelets denoising: ~10ms, deconvolution ~ 56ms on the full res image, on the laptop with the GTX 1650 MaxQ.

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Here my attempt at conveying the sunset mood…

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My attempt with darktable-git

I am currently lost in the dt 3.4 methodology with this image. I would appreciate a tip or two.

My understanding is to not use White Balance, but Color Calibration. When I turn off WB, the image goes to a very green cast. Nothing I try in CC makes it correct.

Also, my understanding of CC is to use D65, but the only thing like that that is available is D50.

What am I doind wrong? In my processing settings, I have selected Scene Referred and Modern.

You need both, in the order that they show up in the 3.4 scene referred workflow.

I set color calibration to “as shot in camera”.

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My take, DT 3.4

DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (13.2 KB)

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dt 3.4. I’m still not very happy with my edit.

DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (9.1 KB)

hmm yeah we do this slightly stupid thing in darktable that we divide out the D65 white balance of the adobe dng matrix when loading it. this way you need to multiply the camera wb coeffs and then the rest of the matrix. this makes it easy to apply wb if you want to do the simple CAT with multipliers in camera rgb. in fact the vkdt image i posted above just uses the dng matrix, without normalising the rows and without any white balance coeffs applied. does not usually turn green this way.

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My take on this gorgeous scenery, I try to enhance the contrast between the dark sky and the softly lighten peaks. I hope I did not over did it ! I processed the image using darktable and had to use (among other things) mask with 2 instances of the exposure module to process the sky with seperately. I find this a little bit complex to achieve such a simple result but did not find a faster way to do it.
Loved using the new color calibration module even though I just feel like a monkey randomly pushing buttons to see what happen … I have to take time to read @anon41087856 full explanation about this, it feels so powerful !

Thanks for sharing the raw :slight_smile:

DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (22.6 KB)

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DSCF8770.RAF.xmp (11.7 KB)