Tone equalizer challenge

[age]

IMG_8336.cr2.xmp (11.6 KB)

[rawfiner]

Here is my take:

Modules used: exposure, tone equalizer, filmic, and local contrast (with parametric mask on midtones)

For toneequalizer: I wanted to compress the highlights only. As the sky and leaves are very interleaved, to avoid halos we can:

• increase feathering
• use a very small radius to avoid smoothing leaves and sky too much together
• use a very big radius so that halos are large enough to be unnoticable

To fix halos, we can also play on the curve, to avoid too big gaps between EVs

I used a radius of 1%, set filter diffusion to 5 to smooth larger details as well, and increase feathering to 100.

This is the mask without smoothing:

This is the mask I get with these parameters:

This is the mask I get if I play only with feathering (still gives a decent result on the sky, which is the part I wanted to smooth to compress highlights. If I wanted to lighten shadows as well, this would be more problematic for local contrast):

[gadolf (Gustavo Adolfo)]

@rawfiner Thanks a lot! Post bookmarked.