I am new here, and i would like to improve my editing skills. So i thought i share a image i captured last week, and see how you would edit it. I would appreciate if you edit the image with Darktable. Your tipps to improve my editing skills are much appreciated.
I hope you forgive my English. It is not my first language.
Your English is fine; my every-other-language is not so hot, so my apologies for having to put up with me. Also, apologies for not using darktable; but there’s something to be learned in every edit IMHO…
An interesting exposure; the scene looks like it should be high-dynamic-range, but it really isn’t. Underexposed, but I much prefer that to having to recover blown highlights. I used a control-point curve to spread the image data out to my preference. i also used a color profile for your camera based on measured spectral sensitivity, data courtesy of the OpenFilmTools project. And, just a little bit of HSL color saturation, because i don’t have the fancy darktable tools… Here’s my rendition, using rawproc:
You specifically asked for darktable edits, and I did a moody/dramatic one a bit earlier. But this being Play Raw and me thinking this is a nice image to play with I had to do an edit using RawTherapee.
Different crop, not as moody (or over-the-top if you like) as my previous one. Kinda like this one better…
As for your processing, actually it’s already pretty good. But the way I see the scene, central element is the illuminated mountain and red tree tops. That should be in the foreground. To that extent I won’t lighten the sky very much, because otherwise the depth of the scene will look flat. The darker sky just reinforces this central motif. Also, I won’t do too much local contrast on the trees in the foreground, because that will amplify the texture and make it look a bit busy.
Sunset_jjbraun_DSC_1005.NEF.xmp (19.4 KB)
Nice picture! I really like the colors
I decided to crop close to a square because I feel it gives the Image a slightly better balance. For me, the challenge was not overdoing the saturation while keeping the strong sunset glow on the highlights.