Secrets of the River

The photo in question is a view of the river Łyna. I took it during my recent walk through the Las Warmiński nature reserve while trying out Fujifilm 200 for Autumn colour photography.

If you're curious about the technical details, I used a Pentax P30N with a Cosina MC Cosinon-W 28 mm 1:2.8 and shot this on Fujifilm 200 at box speed. The exposure time was 1 second, the aperture was f/8. I used a circular polariser for this scene to reduce reflections in the water.

The image itself is fairly unremarkable. The river is littered with branches and fallen trees along the entire nature reserve, making it difficult to encounter a spot with a less busy scene to photograph. I had to roll with what I found. Also, the weather conditions were dull: an overcast sky, a mild drizzle, sad and lifeless colours.

I scanned the negative with my usual rig. I left a tiny bit of unexposed negative on the side and ensured the proper white balance was set in-camera. This is what the photo looks like imported into darktable, with the original exposure correction turned off.

The picture is almost all magenta, with blotches of maroon and a hint of desaturated cyan. This means the dominant colour will be green with cyan and reddish bits. Like many woodland photographs, it will likely demand an analogous colour harmony.

While editing photos from this particular photowalk, I was trying out a trick to make the film grain a bit easier to edit. I applied a subtle negative dehaze. It results in some local contrast loss but Fujifilm 200 isn't sharp enough for this to matter. On the other hand, the grain is softened a little bit.

The next step was fixing the exposure. I moved the original exposure correction module up in the processing chain so it would be applied after the negative conversion into a positive. This way the image became brighter while retaining the exposure module's adjustment direction. If I left it in its original spot, increasing exposure would darken the converted image and vice versa. While I was at it, I also bumped the black point to add some contrast.

The negadoctor module deals with negative conversion. The red, green and blue components were determined by showing negadoctor the unexposed strip of the negative. I adjusted the shadow and highlight corrections manually until the image looked "natural".

After that, I cropped the image to remove the unexposed part. The scan wasn't perfectly straight so I could also straighten the image but I didn't find it necessary. It was just a fraction of a degree anyway.

At this point, the histogram shows only what's on the cropped area, without the unexposed borders or the film holder edge. The contrast is flat, with no true blacks or whites anywhere. Therefore, the next step was adjusting the colour balance. I adjusted the brilliance sliders to spread the histogram a bit more and thus increase contrast. I also bumped global chromacity quite a bit so I could start working with colours afterwards.

I might have got away with no colour correction on this one but I still thought cooling the image down a bit was in order. This change is so subtle it's barely perceptible.

The colour equaliser brought some life to the image. I saturated the oranges and reds. I also dropped the saturation of the greens slightly. Again, I kept the adjustments subtle.

Now came the fun part: dodging and burning. I started with a frame to concentrate the viewer's eyes on the river. I added a vignette. Additionally, I created a mask on the image sides and took a stop off from the exposure.

I wanted to darken certain parts of the image, mostly tree trunks. They were a bit darker than the surrounding areas anyway. I aimed to accentuate that so I drew a mask and reduced the exposure by a quarter of a step.

The areas where the light was falling needed a subtle brightening. Also, I wanted to add brightness to a section of the river where I wanted the viewer's eyes to concentrate. I drew another mask and bumped its exposure by a quarter of a stop.

As a final touch, I created a circular gradient mask where I figured the sun might have been. It was hard to tell with the clouds obscuring the sky but even if I got it wrong, it shouldn't matter. The ambient light was soft and diffuse anyway, providing no sense of directionality to the sunlight. Also, I was working with the image's brightest area anyway. I bumped its exposure by half a stop and then applied some colour balancing. I warmed the area in the highlights and midtones, increased the contrast and added some chromacity in the highlights to emulate a warm highlight of sun peeking from behind the trees. There was no such thing present, of course, but nothing's stopping me from adding an artistic touch to an already edited image.

Here's a final comparison of what I started with and what I ended up with.

I think the result is quite beautiful. There's some clutter that I couldn't edit out but thanks to the image processing, a bland and uninteresting scene got a less dreary, slightly mysterious look. I posted it to Vero.