The last week I was on stromboli and was able to capture some eruptions of the vulkano.
I found it very difficult to set the correct exposure as the light situation varied quickly…
Anyway, I took some nice shots. But nearly all of them face the problem of clipped highlights
I’m not really pleased with my results using darktable 3.8.0. I’m sure there are better ways to deal with the highlights. I’m also not really pleased with the colors of the fire.
Therefore I like to share one of the pictures for a playraw challenge.
I would love to see the hottest part of the outbreak in fire-yellow and the rest of the fire in proper fire-red…
I like how you dealt with the clipped area. I’ve noticed that you did not use the reconstruct tab of filmic. It seems to me that the tone equalizer in combination with the diffuse & sharpen does the trick for you!
I’ve tried to redo that but I’m struggling with the mask…
Yes. A lot of tone-eq to dial down the the highlights and then d/s to get them yellowish, started from the inpaint highlights preset and tweaked until I liked the result. For my edit it was also important to set preserve chrominance in filmic to none, to preserve the yellow and orange tones. Also no highlight reconstruction module at the beginning of the pipeline.
It seems to be just very tricky to get this to work. The settings of d/s and the mask are very dependant from the previous modules in the pipeline. So I’m afraid you can not easily copy them from my edit to yours. I too had more problems on you redit to get a reasonably result. Like in my edit I first added a second instance of tone-eq to curb more of the highlights. I also used an elliptical shape for the mask to limit its area of effect. Everything else is just trial and error.
This is the best I could get based on your edit with just some more tone-eq.
I normally use it for problematic situations, but this time it didn’t work for me. But what I did with d/s, you can do with filmic too. Here I outsourced filmic hl-reconstruction to a second instance, preserve chrominance to none.
There is now a very small amount of filmic hl-reconstruction. Instead of d/s I use a second instance of color balance rgb after filmic, masked like d/s before, to tweak the colors. If you set this module after filmic, don’t forget to change blend mode.
For me, this setup is way easier to handle. (Update: Take a little bit care of clipping)
