Darkroom Challenge Digital Darkroom Derby #60 - CLOSED - Winner announced.

Herbert Hound

Top Veteran
Location
The Welsh Borders
Name
Colin
This is Digital Darkroom Derby #60, a digital image editing/processing challenge.

Please read the rules here. Short version: Host provides the challenge image and selects the winner, who then becomes the next host.

This is a piccie of the local church taken this morning.

I've been trying out a linear profile based on my camera, so this is what I get imported into lightroom without my usual import preset. It looks really flat because there's no Adobe profile added either.

P8210004.jpg
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The ORF and lightroom-generated JPEG may be found here.

The challenge will close at 18:00 hrs (GMT) on Wednesday, August 24. On your marks... get set... GO!


p.s. Sorry, but I don't seem to be able to format the Start Date/End Date at the top. It looks fine to my edit, but doesn't post properly. I'm sure you'll manage!
 
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Well... that wasn't easy. Lots of good entries (thank you all) and if I could make a final image with a mix of various things you did then I'd be a happy man.

I posted this image for "The Greens". I've taken pictures of various trees where I could see a range of obviously different shades of greens only to find that, when uploaded, they all looked the same. I've used the "selective color" adjustment layer in Photoshop to try and differentiate the various greens, but it's less than ideal. So, as I've only been doing this photography thing for 6 months, I was interested to see what you good people would come up with and wondering whether it was me, my processing or if it was an "Olympus thing" and if other makes of camera render greens more accurately. (...or is it my colour vision?? Hmmm!) As the church view is 3 mins walk from my house it was easy to check out the different entries.

So... my thoughts...

First off, there are three different greens in the pic, the grass, the two trees on the left and the tree on the right.
The two trees on the left are the English or Common Yew (Taxus baccata) and they're often found in English churchyards (lots of theories why from shelter, to making bows and because they like decomposing bodies!!) and can be over a thousand years old - this is a 12th century church. These Yews have a distinctly orange tinge to the dark green. The one at the back collapsed this past Winter so the red bark is visible.
The tree on the right is an Irish Yew (Taxus baccata fastigiata), a much younger tree - they only started cultivating this sub-species in 1820. This Yew has a distinctly blue-ish tinge to its foliage.

There are no distinct shadows in the pic so it wasn't a bright, bright sunshiny day... careful with that sky!

Honourable mention goes to @Rose McGill's entry #2 (post #14) for an excellent crop which brought emphasis to the church and took the eye away from the cut-off top of the storm damaged tree. (Mmmm... perhaps clone that top spike of the church tower out so it didn't touch the frame?) It was also a thoughtful B&W coversion in character with the subject.

It was very difficult to choose between @WhidbeyLVR's entry #1 (post #16) and @BosseBe's entry #1 (post #3) for first place.
@WhidbeyLVR's was a good crop to show the churchyard as a whole scene and all the colours were good... except for the Irish Yew on the right. I realise you weren't to know about that tree, but "hey!" :)

So @BosseBe gets my nomination for winner this time. This entry was the only one to bring out the blue-ish tinge of the Irish Yew and, IMHO, cropping out the white building (the post office) on the right would've made the pic a clear winner as it kept drawing my eye over to the edge of the frame. But this was all about the greens!

@BosseBe... I have a 30 day free trial of DxO PL5 at the moment so I was wondering if you could share a tip or two as to your "secret sauce" please? Nothing I could do globally in lightroom or photoshop would give me the correct colour for that tree. I had to duplicate the pic, then on one copy mask the tree out and colour grade it and then combine it with the original pic.

My interpretation...

P8210004-Edit-4-Edit.jpg
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Thanks for the win!

Here is my settings for this picture:
Use the "DxO Standard" Preset to get lens corrections and smart lighting at Uniform, Slight.
Clearview Plus at 25.
Contrast: Microcontrast an the Auto setting, 16, and then Contrast and Fine Contrast set to the same, 16.
Color Accentuation, both Vibrancy and Saturation at 20.
DeepPRIME NR at default settings, (Sure this photo is at ISO 100 so NR should not be needed, but DeepPRIME uses another De-Moasicing technique that I like, just think the pictures looks better using it).
Crop, there are some margin both at left and right sides of the picture from the sensor, so I moved the crop to use the left side fully.
Tone Curve, a slight inverse S.
HSL, Blue channel Saturation 13 and Luminance -13.
Finally White Balance, picked the WB from the white house and ended up with Temp 4958 and Tint 4.

I will try to find a picture for the next challenge tonight.
 
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