Hi,
Hopefully i am i the right group/tag?
I am very new to darktable and have been re-editing some images I previously processed in Raw Therapee.
In Raw therapee, I was able to bring out more detail in the in the background of this image, but I am unsure how to do this in darktable.
Attached is a JPG of what I have achieved in DT so far. I feel the background looks a little washed out. Obviously I don’t want to go overboard with lifting the background too much but I am curious about how it can be isolated for adjustments in DT.
I was hoping someone would like to attempt to play with this image as they see fit but also explain the steps they took to improve the background detail.
Thanks
Even though there are more details in the background. I didn’t try to gain more details out of it. It looks like it was hot, the air shimmered and there is not much to see. So I concentrated on the subject. The win of detail in the background is a side effect of the use of local contrast and contrast equalizer.
Used G’MIC’s Dehaze along with Unplugged Effect’s Inkrubber to darken the mountain area and sky. Used wavelet denoise selectively in the sky to do some cleanup (still noisy; oh well), and a few other things for the result.
My first black and white edit in darktable! Thanks for sharing this awesome photo.
In regards to isolating the background, you might try a gradient mask along the horizon. You could use something like tone equalizer to add contrast. In my edit, I used the path tool to draw a mask around the mountain on the left that has the nice silhouette and brought down its exposure a bit to add a hinted “destination” to help fit the story of the path. I took a similar approach for the path (boosted contrast) and the right and left sides of the foreground (darkened very slightly).
