I did have the occasional use of a Nikon D800 while my camera was away for repair.
Living in the Highlands of Scotland means that in summer the days are long compared to those towards the south of the UK. We pay for it in the winter though, when the days are shorter.
The days are shortening at the moment, this does have the advantage that one can take blue hour pictures at a reasonable time in the evening. This is the local hydroelectric dam in the dusk. Why the lights are on, who knows? The dam is completely automated, with nobody on site. 20220807_0009.NEF (37.8 MB) 20220807_0009.NEF.xmp (10.9 KB)
These files are licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
Thank you for yet another of your wonderful shots.
With this one I experimented - I hope I haven’t ruined it!
In Filmulator I created a series of exposures from -2 to +3 EV in 1 EV steps. Blended with Enfuse and then into GIMP where I did extreme things with my luminosity mask plug-in.
Thanks for sharing the image. An image like this is so open to personal interpretation but here is my take on it. I also decided to outline my steps as this might help some people new to the DT workflow. But keep in mind that this is only my workflow and others may disagree with the order or the use of certain modules.
Set the white balance to daylight (direct sunlight) to capture the colours as colour slide film would have done if using film. This brings out the natural blue colour of the sky and the warm tones of the incandescent lights. White balance needs to be set before using filmic.
Apply the picture style I have created that adds denoise (profile), basic colorfulness and initial demosiacing sharpening with the diffuse or sharpen module. Denoising is important at this stage if using auto adjustments in filmic.
Next I went to the exposure module and set the exposure slider to +2.0 to brighten up the midtones of the image. This must be set before using the auto tune settings in filmic.
In the filmic scene tab, I used the auto tune levels eyedropper to set the white and black relative exposure sliders. This step compresses the captured data into a range of values that can be displayed on a computer screen.
This left the power station looking overexposed. So, I create a new instance of exposure and set to -0.66 EV. Then I used a drawn path mask to isolate the effect to the power station. I feathered and blurred the mask for an invisible transition.
I activated the shadow and highlights module to the default values. If you notice halos change the softening method to bilateral filter. I like this module despite the criticism made against it by some users.
I activated the local contrast module to the default values.
I activated the tone equalizer module and hovered the mouse over the dark sections of the image to brighten them. The power station was also darkened in the same way.
I returned to the look tab in filmic and set the final contrast.
The two orange lights in the bottom left were distracting, so I used the restore module with the active healing algorithm and a circle brush to remove the lights.
I applied a final sharpening step by using the sharpen module at default values
I see the Play Raw category as providing images from which we can learn from one another. The trickier images are open to different workflows and interpretations, something an easier image might not provide.
Something that baffles me, this dam is the bottom-most of several, each of which generate hydroelectric power. In fact, some 97% of Scottish electricity comes from renewables, so I don’t understand why my energy costs are going up so much.
For my interpretation I decided that the illuminated dam was the subject of the image and the blend compressed the artificial lighting levels smoothly. However, I wished to show a little detail in the surroundings to give context.
This is where the forum is great. We all have our own interpretations - all equally valid, but as the old saying goes “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” (man being the neuter noun which describes the species).
No offence taken!
But your message served a useful purpose. In future I will try to remember, not only to explain the process, also to state my aims. Others can then better judge the result.
