Darkroom Challenge Digital Darkroom Derby #257 - Results posted

kae1

kae1

All-Pro
Supporter
Location
West Yorkshire
Name
Ken
Start Date
Jan 10, 2025
End Date
Jan 13, 2025
Welcome to the Digital Darkroom Derby #257, a digital image editing/processing challenge.

I know we have only just taken down our Christmas Trees but here's a reminder of how Haworth looked this year.

These challenges are open to everyone. If you have any interest in practicing or improving your image editing and post-processing skills, please feel free to join in!

The rules are here. Please read them.

PC300203.JPG
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Challenge ends on Monday 13th of January at 0800 UTC.

The raw and jpeg files can be found here.
 
kae1 said:
Unfortunately not, but I live only a mile away so it's easy enough to walk into the village and onto the moors.
As a Bronte fan you mighty appreciate these pictures of the Church and Parsonage.
View attachment 522989View attachment 522990
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Yes, indeed! Thank you. I've read several biographies of the Bronte family. I noticed in your challenge photo the infamous Black Bull tavern, where Branwell (Charlotte's brother) hung out and drank to excess.
 
Entry #2: Darkened entry #1 somewhat (I wasn't sure how much daylight remains about 30 minutes after sunset, but I think it would be closer to my 2nd entry). Edit 1: Sky looked much too saturated, so I reduced its saturation. Edit 2: Thanks to @OCBeyer's comment, using the clone stamp tool in Elements, I removed the spurious person on the extreme right that resulted from my having used content aware fill.

PC300203_DxO-1dcLL5.jpg
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OCBeyer said:
OK, I'm curious. How is it that you have more on the far right of the photo than in the original? A couple extra people and another row house?
Click to expand...
Thank you-- good question: I'd not noticed the discrepancy before you pointed it out. The editing steps were as follows:

1. In DxO, converted raw file into a photo format: shows only one extra person on the right that is in the raw file, but there is keystone distortion.
PC300203 Copy_DxOLM.jpg
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2. I tried to compensate for the distortion, resulting in this, then I cropped the image as approximated by the white border:
PC300203_DxOALM.jpg
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3. I then selected the blank (black) areas and used "content aware fill" in Elements, which "invented" the extra little person that I had not noticed (so I did not remove it) to get the final image. Now I'll try to remove it from my 2nd, but not my 1st entry, since I have time to do that.
Thank you for your question (and now I'll try to be more careful when using content aware fill :) )
 
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OCBeyer said:
OK, I'm curious. How is it that you have more on the far right of the photo than in the original? A couple extra people and another row house?
Click to expand...
Interestingly, I tried using ACR that comes with Elements to convert the raw file to jpeg, and I got a slightly smaller area (exactly as the other entries show) than I got with DxO, as shown below. If my memory serves, I think @WhidbeyLVR once gave an explanation for this phenomenon, which I no longer remember; perhaps if Lyle sees this he would be kind enough to explain it to us.

PC300203_ACR.jpg
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gecko said:
Interestingly, I tried using ACR that comes with Elements to convert the raw file to jpeg, and I got a slightly smaller area (exactly as the other entries show) than I got with DxO, as shown below. If my memory serves, I think @WhidbeyLVR once gave an explanation for this phenomenon, which I no longer remember; perhaps if Lyle sees this he would be kind enough to explain it to us.

View attachment 523315
Click to expand...
I believe that it is associated with automatic barrel/pincushion correction that is part of the M43 spec. The more distortion your lens has, the more room is reserved at the edges to correct it. Some raw processors will let you play with the uncorrected raw data.
 
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Background paragraph, so feel free to skip. As you all know by now I'm a pray, spray and hope (to sort out in editing) photographer i.e. not a proper photographer. This was my first specific outing to take some shots of the Christmas lights and the station in Haworth (a couple posted here) . I started down at the station at twilight with its Christmas lights but my first image looked like daylight with the illuminations all blown. My solution was to dial in -0.7 of exposure compensation in the hope that the lights wouldn't be as blown and the image didn't look like daylight. By the time I'd got up the hill to the village centre, passing a chap with his camera on a tripod, the light had started to go and the evening was setting in. So what I ended up with was not too blown illuminations, but quite a dark end result shot wide open with a slow shutter speed ending up at ISO 6400 (and the understanding why the chap had chosen to take his tripod and the other visitors their (AI equipped) phones!).

Back to the challenge. When I took this image I was looking to find an image which didn't blow the lights and tried to capture the night and didn't look too much like it would have appeared an hour earlier. Plus correction of the distortion and some sort of compensation for the high ISO used in terms of noise reduction/sharpening when I got home. You've all submitted some nice edits which have compensated for the shortcomings to different degrees.

1736750425679.png


My top three are
Winner - @gecko #2 - I like the exposure, distortion correction, which allowed the top of the church to be included, and the colours
First runner up - @griffljg #1 - I like the exposure, colours, distortion correction and level of sharpness without looking over-sharpened
Second runner up - @Rob R #1 I like the crop, exposure, colours and distortion correction

Congratulations, Rashid and over to you for the next challenge (y)

For completeness my two entries would have been (... and not a B&W submission😱)
PC300203_DxOc.jpg
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PC300203_DxOb.jpg
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