Gael Varoquaux
Trees on the ridge
Dedicated to the rock band "if these trees could talk"
I was ski-touring with my parents (it's skiing, but climbing in the mountains, and long only going downhill). The sun was behind a hill and there was a lot of wind, which was picking up snow and sending it in the air close to the ridges. This specific ridge had trees that were shining in the sun, I believe because they had snow in the air around them that was deflecting the sunlight. I was interested in this specific feature, and I took a picture underexposing severely, to focus the attention on it. Unfortunately, the ridge was far, and I had to zoom a lot, which somewhat harmed the quality of the picture.
To get the atmosphere that I was interested in, I post-processed the picture quite a lot. I made it a bit darker while preserving the highlight. I made the colors a bit warmer both in the highlights and in the shadows. I made the hill in the foreground very dark, as I was interested in it only as an outline.
Specifically, for post-processing, I used darktable. I used a varity of tone curve filters to increase the contrast around the ridge and the trees as well as an equalizer filter, keeping in mind to balance the gain in contrast with denoising settings on the equalizer. I used a tone curve to make the sky darker, with a drawn mask using a path that fit the shape of the hill. It created the halo effect of the hill. I used a color correction filter to bring highlight toward orange and I tuned the white balance to get an overall warmer picture.
To create some texture in the hill, I used a horrible hack to duplicate the few trees: I used the "spot removal", which create local clones of the texture, to multiply the number of trees. This required a "creative" use of a tool meant to remove spots.
For denoising, I used a global non-local means filter, with an opacity of 33% (so as to let some of the grain of the original image pass through), and an additional one, stronger, but only applied away from the trees, so as not to damage the texture of the trees.
Trees on the ridge
Dedicated to the rock band "if these trees could talk"
I was ski-touring with my parents (it's skiing, but climbing in the mountains, and long only going downhill). The sun was behind a hill and there was a lot of wind, which was picking up snow and sending it in the air close to the ridges. This specific ridge had trees that were shining in the sun, I believe because they had snow in the air around them that was deflecting the sunlight. I was interested in this specific feature, and I took a picture underexposing severely, to focus the attention on it. Unfortunately, the ridge was far, and I had to zoom a lot, which somewhat harmed the quality of the picture.
To get the atmosphere that I was interested in, I post-processed the picture quite a lot. I made it a bit darker while preserving the highlight. I made the colors a bit warmer both in the highlights and in the shadows. I made the hill in the foreground very dark, as I was interested in it only as an outline.
Specifically, for post-processing, I used darktable. I used a varity of tone curve filters to increase the contrast around the ridge and the trees as well as an equalizer filter, keeping in mind to balance the gain in contrast with denoising settings on the equalizer. I used a tone curve to make the sky darker, with a drawn mask using a path that fit the shape of the hill. It created the halo effect of the hill. I used a color correction filter to bring highlight toward orange and I tuned the white balance to get an overall warmer picture.
To create some texture in the hill, I used a horrible hack to duplicate the few trees: I used the "spot removal", which create local clones of the texture, to multiply the number of trees. This required a "creative" use of a tool meant to remove spots.
For denoising, I used a global non-local means filter, with an opacity of 33% (so as to let some of the grain of the original image pass through), and an additional one, stronger, but only applied away from the trees, so as not to damage the texture of the trees.