Nostalgia & History > What a difference two years can make...

I posted the first shot back in August, 2024.  It was taken with a Nikon Z7 using RAW (Nikon nef format) rather than JPEG.  That's 14 bits for nef, and 8 bits for JPEG.  I really was not getting my money's worth when I edited it in 2024.  Earlier this year I took a deep look at Darktable, which I've used as my RAW image developer for maybe ten years.  Ten years ago editing in Darktable was similar to editing in Gimp, which is my digi image editor, so I just used Darktable as an image converter and Gimp as the image editor.  Well, over ten years, Darktable grew a lot and it's editing power grew a lot, which I discovered in early February of this year.  Since my recent discovery I've learned a lot of what I can do with a RAW image in Darktable, and I'm still learning.

Today I went looking for this image because I knew there were things that I could improve over my original posting of the image back in 2024.  

1.  The color balance of the original was off towards the red because I was using a polarizing filter to boost whatever contrast there was to boost.  You can see the obvious difference between the two images.  The second image benefits because I was able adjust the color balance so that the effects of the polarizer were neutralized, giving much more pleasing colors.

2.  There was no decent balance between the sky and ground in the first image.  I could adjust the image with gimp so that I had a nice blue sky, while letting the ground detail get pushed into the mud, or I could have decent ground detail with a either a washed or blown-out sky.  If I muddled it as well as I could, I could get a passable shot (image one) that left me wanting to pull my scant hair out.  With the advent of new tools and knowledge, I was able to get a nice blue sky with white clouds AND a decent shot of the ground action.  My trick was masking.  I adjusted the brightness for the sky and for the ground separately by adjusting my mask so that either the ground or the sky was adjusted independently of the other.  I did the same for the color:  I masked to affect just the sky, and masked again for the ground.

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