Darkroom Challenge Digital Darkroom Derby #141 -- CLOSED, results announced

[gecko]

Start Date

Aug 11, 2023

End Date

Aug 14, 2023

Welcome to the Digital Darkroom Derby #141, a digital image editing/processing challenge. The rules are here. Please read them.

Challenge ends on Monday, August 14 at 6pm EDT (22 h UTC).

JPG file: _1100124.JPG
RAW file: _1100124.RW2

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[griffljg]

Entry #1:

Interesting challenge. - This is an example of why, when taking photos which I know will require some Keystone correction in post processing, I always include too much. - ie Zoom out.

As usual for me now, I first ran the RW2 file through DxO PureRAW 3 for both noise reduction (not that there was much) and lens correction purposes, before importing the resulting DNG file into Capture One Pro 23.

Performed 100% Keystone correction, but this cropped out too much and made the extremities of the image look excessively distorted. Wound it back to 80%. - Looked a lot better, but still not ideal. Decided to stick with it though. Adjusted the crop to get the maximum amount of useful information into the image, before fiddling around with White Balance (warmed it up a bit), Exposure, Brightness, Highlight recovery, Shadow recovery and Contrast.

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[kae1]

Entry #1 DXO PL5 then Elements

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[kae1]

Entry #2

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[gecko]

Very nice contributions so far-- many thanks! The Challenge will close in about 24 hours.

 

[Stiga]

#1 DxO PL6 > Photoshop ACR crop, adjust exposure & colour temp

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[gecko]

The Challenge is now closed. Many thanks go all who have contributed. I thought that this would be easy to judge, but looking at the submissions I see that I was so wrong! I'll try to post the results sometime tomorrow.

 

[gecko]

Thank you all for submitting your beautiful edits. The photo was taken at a flea market in 2017. I did not find judging this Challenge to be easy, even as there were only four entries. At the outset, I decided that color was important in this particular image. So the choice was among the three color entries. In my (very subjective) view, each entry had its own good points. After going over them many times, and knowing that a choice was necessary, I decided as follows:

Winner: Larry. I liked the bright, airy feeling, the color balance, and the keystone correction.
1st runner up: Ken's first entry. I particularly liked the emphasis on the main subject (the balloon lady) by blurring the background.
2nd runner up: Stiga. I liked the color balance and the brightness.

So over to you, Larry (@griffljg).

 

[Stiga]

Thanks for the second place

 

[griffljg]

Thanks for the win. I am searching through my archives looking for the next challenge.

 

[griffljg]

Digital Darkroom Derby #142 is now open.