Photo of the Month — 2014-07

I decided to start a photo-of-the-month series; hopefully I will be able to keep it up. Unfortunately the upload limitation on this platform is 1MB per picture so you won’t get high-res for now. The picture was taken last fall in Oberengadin, Switzerland, close to Salecina House. It was a breath-taking sunset and I was very tired from a day of hiking, but thankful for having been there right at that moment!

These three bracketed shots were originally taken (+0.66EV, -1.33EV, +2.66EV):

They were then joined into an HDR with Luminance HDR and afterwards two tonemappings were created, one with the Fattal algorithm and one with Mantiuk06:

I have presets for the algorithms that I usually use, but I am not 100% sure if they were used in this case. For Fattal I usually use default settings, for Mantiuk06 I usually increase Saturation factor a little (to ~1.0) and sometime decrease contrast factor. These two images where then blended 50% each with ImageMagick into this shot:

This was then finalized with Darktable, only tuning the base curve (influences brightness and contrast) to the shot you see in the beginning. If it seems a little dark to you, that’s something I also realized when looking at my pictures on other screens. My color correctness is not very good and I usually have brightness cranked up to 100% because it gives a better picture… I hope to get some nice 4k screen with better color correctness once they are cheaper.

All my photos, as usual, dual-licensed under CC-by-nc-sa and GPLv3.