I’ve cycled through Iceland this summer with my girlfriend. On the last day before we left we had an amazing sunset. I’ve found a nice spot on the coast during low tide to photograph the sunset. I liked the volcano stone which was still wet. So I set up my camera with a polarizer to get more reflections from the stones and a graduated ND filter to not overexpose the sky but get as much information for the foreground as possible. I choose f/13 to have a sharp image and get a sunstar, which didn’t work out. Thanks to peaking and magnification you can focus more or less on the hyperfocal distance and then check if everything is sharp. Not easy while covering the sun with one hand.
Sun can damage your sensor. If you can’t look into the sun with your eyes, don’t do that with a camera. Keep exposure as short as possible and do it only with wide angle lenses. As soon as everything was fine, I moved the camera to look to the right not into the sun. I don’t want that the sun burns or heats my camera.
I’m just an amateur photographer who is still learning
Post-processing only done in darktable using a camera profile.
The spot tool in darktable isn’t the best and I really don’t understand that new retouch module. However I could try to do it with GIMP, but with GIMP I don’t understand those colorspaces yet. For print I normally export as AdobeRGB and GIMP seems to only use sRGB.
It’s easy to use for healing. Just select the red cross (healing tool) and then create a shape (circle, path, …) like the old spot removal iop. I removed that red spot in my edit (in the other thread) if you are interested in checking its sidecar.
I’d do it with Gimp, but we can do it more automatically.
We make the pixels within a circle transparent, making a hole, then fill that hole giving priority to hole pixels where adjacent pixels contain most detail. The hole is filled from matching pixels within a 100 pixel radius of the hole.
I’ve been working on methods for identifying purple edges and similar aberrations. I have nothing to automatically detect lens flare. When it’s really obvious, I like it – it’s just part of the photographic process. But I dislike small coloured spots like this one.