I took this one a couple of days ago and feel like while I love the signpost and mailbox it’s lacking a little something. Someone (on a different bit of internet) suggested it would look good in a monochrome infrared look, so I tried that too!
Any ideas?
Shot on a Nokia X30 with the regular camera app.
Edit: When I bought this phone, a while back, I searched everywhere to find a DNG sample but couldn’t find one anywhere… so eventually got it anyway after a good play with the camera in a store. And it turned out to be great - beats any compact camera I’ve ever had, albeit with a fixed 24mm-ish lens.
Is there anywhere I should submit samples to? It seems to play perfectly with darktable as it is, except for there being no denoise profile. I guess raw.pixls?
I’ll be interested to see how others tease the various colours of straw out of the image.
The general landscape reminds me of some of my work travels just after Uni.
IMG_20230903_163111.dng.xmp (19.5 KB)
Darktable 4.5 & Sigmoid, Monochrome conversion with color zones for color brightness and desaturation using the tone curve module
Greetings from Brussels,
Christian
Very interesting and graphically strong image! I wonder how many bird nests (and maybe snakes?) can be found in that … jug … or whatever it is… Yikes!
Without a camera profile it was an interesting edit. By default the cyan-ish sky suggests (to me at least) a kind of Mediterranean vibe. I went in an different but still stylized direction.
The image has a noticeable vignette to it by default, maybe typical of the short focal length of a phone camera? I’ve not messed with enough phone camera images (mine or otherwise) to know. As a result, adding a slight vignette as well as a gradient to the top of the sky made for a pretty dramatic end effect.
FYI it’s near Cooma in south eastern NSW, Australia. Ever been here?
I think it’s an old milk churn… but used as a mailbox. Currently too, I think.
Hmm… I didn’t notice much in darktable - I think most phone camera files have an embedded gainmap which (more or less) corrects for vignetting and color casts. In dt those are applied automatically - in ART I think you may have to enable it somewhere, like input profile or something? I haven’t used ART much…
Yeah, @priort pointed that out a few weeks ago on a different topic, but I didn’t find it offhand. Just now did. Really flattens that sucker out! LOL Oh well, the vignette wasn’t a problem, in fact it was the look I was after. It just assisted me in getting there:
Ah, I was was just trying to find it without success! Gee it makes a big difference doesn’t it.
I’ve noticed that in really low light I can see the amount of noise is much higher in the corners… now I wonder why!
I guess at f/1.9 and 5.5mm there are a few compromises to be made! No getting around physics.
On a related note, I love the scenery there - That kind of slightly rolling, open land where you can see for miles, I mean kilometers. None (apparently, or at least very few) of those nasty trees getting in the way of the view. This is what it mostly looks like around here:
Yes, this area (the Monaro or Southern Tablelands) has quite a lot of this. It’s around 900-1000 meters above sea level here, so chilly in winter. It was always mostly grassland I think but it’s been further cleared for grazing over the last 200 years or so - although there’s still plenty of trees in the hills.
This snap was taken from a hill top only a few kilometers from the signpost, and you can see the wooded hills right along the horizon. That’s looking east-ish, towards the escarpment ranges. Behind those the altitude falls right off down to the South Coast.
As it happens I “celebrated” the 2000 New Years on Mt Kosciuszko and in Thredbo (after driving non-stop from Brisbane).
After leaving Uni - one of my first jobs was undertaking Mobile Phone equipment/tower maintenance for Optus. The area of responsibility was basically a circle with the perimeter a few-hundred kilometers into the NT and down to Armadale covering Queensland and the borders. Would travel for more than a day - do 30mins of work - to then travel home (those were the days).
Back then - I had a Canon 300D which I used extensively on my travels. I should try to find the RAW images from back then and upload them to see how people deal with processing retro digital images.
Interesting - the actual reason for my little road trip on this occasion was to do a little portable amateur radio excursion - SOTA (Summits On The Air to be exact). On the hill with the same name as that sign, as it happens!
My friend Brett came along, and we had a good look around the comms facility on this hill, which was more interesting as he used to work for a telecoms company and pointed out interesting bits and pieces.
No getting around physics.
