I recently walked along the English coast and captured a nice afternoon sun bursting through the clouds over a scenic setting of a lonely house and lake. Perhaps overambitiously I intentionally under-exposed the image by -3EV, hoping to recover all the details in Darktable. Unfortunately, for my lack of knowledge of Darktable I have not been able to to this well; I managed to obtain some over-processed image that does not look at all natural anymore (XMP attached). While not pleasing visually it shows that a lot of detail remains in the dark parts of the image, so my hope is that some more capable photographers can rescue this image in Darktable.
@Sebastian_Nowozin Because your first post does not contain the jpeg, the preview does not appear on the playraw main page, as you can see in this screenshot
Well, since it is very noisy in the dark area I just prefer not to fight for colors and convert it to b/w. I don’t care about the blown out sky, I want it to create certain mood. Reminds me of gritty HP5+ shots.
Great image. I always love when the cloud open little windows. Mornings are always fun.
I did not want to pull too much light in the house - there is blue/purple sections in the house which to me start becoming strange when trying to lighten the house too much. This is my first ever take in play_raw. Always wanted to do this but never had courage enough to post my edits - there is first for everything
Instead of a filmic curve, I applied a loggamma curve to lift all the shadows into the mid part of the histogram, then applied a S-shaped control curve to better control the shadow gradient with control points. Also, since there is very little “color” in the image, i applied my dorky HSL saturation tool and amped the multiplier to 2.0. Not natural color, but pleasing to me…
Edit: The danger with the control point curve is that one can play with it to one’s demise… In using this image to debug my x_trans mosaic selection; I decided to drag the low-left control point to the right a bit to crush the lowest blacks, and in doing so I got better low-end contrast:
As the dynamic range was truly extreme here, I output two different exposures using Filmulator and blended them manually in GIMP, taking care to maintain the contrast of the sunbeams.
This is my first time doing it and I’m using a mouse so the blending might be a bit lumpy…
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