Spent far too long and used far too many modules trying to fix this blown out sky. I wonder whether it was worth it and whether anyone else would be able to do a better, simpler job.
20230813_0082_01.CR2.xmp (34.2 KB)
20230813_0082.CR2 (64.3 MB)
(Edit: Added tad more saturation and local contrast to ground in jpeg… I can’t stop myself…)
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That’s interesting. I’d been thinking of darkening the foreground to create interest along the valley but didn’t have the guts go so strong but I think it works great. Thanks
Yeah, once you’ve lost the data in all three channels, it’s hard to make anything of a blown patch…
I like the capture, nice complementary textures in the foliage and the sky. Here’s what I did in rawproc:
Essentially, my default filmic curve doesn’t go to the upper-right corner by default, if I wanted it to, I check that ‘norm’ box to the right. In this case, what it does is to make those blown areas a very light gray, takes them out of the "lookee, I’m a blown highlight’ category. I don’t know if you can shape darktable’s filmic that way, so YMMV.
I also added a touch of hillbilly HSL saturation before departing linear, makes those purple flowers or whatever they are stand out.
Nice. I find it tricky to dull fully clipped areas without them looking like someone used a paint roller in grey on a chunk of the sky. The flowers are heather
Heather, thanks…
My wife is the “botanist” of the family, knows the flowers by name and smell. Me, early on living in Colorado, I pulled up some plants I thought were weeds, they turned out to be columbines she had planted, the state flower of Colorado. 
Thanks for the play, @TonyBarrett!
I tried to get a bit more oompf into the clouds.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Haha. I eventually got a young botany graduate to help me do something with the garden after about five years of “rewilding” and then promptly left it go wild again. When I finally came to yanking out some of the “weeds”, I was pulling up things with a plant pot shaped root systems and then desperately trying to replant them without causing too much damage to the stuff I’d obviously paid to put in in the past.
JPEG’s a bit pinky!
Not trying to be critical and maybe its the light or the haze but is the photo a bit blurry or out of focus?? Maybe just the way it looks on my setup?? I extracted the preview jpg which was 8MB and it sort of looked the same to me so I was thinking it was just looking at the raw that gave that impression but I got the same feel from the jpg… I then thought that it might have grabbed focus close in the foreground but it still seems lacking initial detail there?? Maybe my eyes are just shot??
I think the photo is sharp. It’s just the very foreground (the lower right part), which the depth of field doesn’t reach.
I think it’s a combination of part of the focus area being near the edge, maybe lens related? If you look at the boulder near the right edge, it looks perfectly in focus. I think the large green ferns being closer than the pink flowers also gives it a sort of illusion, since they’re less in focus than the flowers.
You could well be right, Todd. I maybe need to calibrate the camera. Will have a look at some other shots with this combination.
I noticed earlier in this shot with the same camera/lens that the largest root in the bottom left of the image seemed out of focus relative to the rest of the shot. Maybe there’s some issue with the lens or user error.
o well, at least we can rule out motion blur on the subjects side, i think 
I think maybe it can also be that I have a standard resolution screen… your image has a ton of pixels that have to be worked down to that… I wonder what this would look like on an 8K monitor… 
I just have 2.5K. So, basically, what I thought was a bargain used 50MP camera (5DSR) is probably completely wasted on me. (I suppose I kinda knew that already…).
