Hello,
perhaps has someone another idea how to process this waterfall photo auf the Drachenschlucht close to Eisenach / Germany?
Attached U´ll find the raw and my approach
Moss is hard without seeing the actual scene. I went with the coloration in my local area, but this may be very off!
Punchy variant with ART and AgX (Kodak film and paper):
20250502_Drachenschlucht_5809.ARW.arp (35.4 KB)
Here is my attempt in DT 5.1. This subject is one of those that might benefit from exposure merging techniques to cover such a huge dynamic range of lighting.
20250502_Drachenschlucht_5809.ARW.xmp (30.9 KB)
Fun pic to play with…I think I’m way off on the color.
I tweaked the crop, shear, and perspective to fit what I’d like, the applied a tone eq mask and global tone eq. Also used that same path for exposure and color eq adjustments. All of those paths were applied to the waterfall itself. Other than that I just used most of the standard scene referred workflow modules to adjust the image…except I forgot to use diffuse and sharpen this time.
DT 5.0, Windows
20250502_Drachenschlucht_5809.ARW.xmp (30.0 KB)
My attempt, with Agx only, with masking to manage the dynamic range
20250502_Drachenschlucht_5809.ARW.xmp (14.0 KB)
Two attempts at this picture - neither very successful.
Start for both: created five exposures from Filmulator, (-2 to +2 EV), blended with enfuse. In GIMP the first was adjusted with luminosity mask plug-in.
The second, I used my saturation mask plug-in to adjust brightness and contrast in the various regions of saturation.
Exclusioned the sky (one of my favorite GIMP layer settings for some things), and some additional enhancements. 
Great. How did you recover the blown out lights in the middle upper? What is your colo restauration technique?
Using RawTherapee 5.12, highlights are reconstructed with the Color Propogation method at max Blur (because the background is/should appear beyond the focal plane). The dynamic range is reduced futher in the wavelets Residual Image module.
To tone down the chroma, I used a spot with the Color Appearance / Source Data Adjustment tool in B/W mode.
Nice waterfall! Is it a difficult hike?
My contribution …
Made with darktable 5.1 …
