Photo of the Month — 2014-09

With a minor delay, here is the photo of the month for September. It was taken this February in Zermatt, Switzerland.

It is a Panorama consisting of eight individual Portrait-orientated shots, stitched together with Hugin. Unfortunately (again) the size limitations of this blog prevent me from giving you a better resolution / quality. The original is 8512×4634 and roughly 200MB big.

Developing and editing was tricky on this one, and used the opportunity to learn about regional masks in Darktable. Before all editing, the stitch looked like this:

After the usual corrections (basecurve, lighting, local contrast), the picture looked like this:

As you can see, the snow on the Matterhorn itself was a little darker/greyer then the other snow which results in poor contrast with the surroundings, likely a result of different contrast in the original individual pictures. By creating a manually drawn mask around the Matterhorn and applying another brightness increase of about 0,10 EV just to the region the final photo is attained.
I love darktable, have I mentioned that?