I've been playing around with some more individual photos in Darktable, and well, I'll show you the before-after processes of 5 photos today. Again, feel free to tell what you think about these.
1. Beam of Light
Shutter speed: 1/100 Aperture: f/5 ISO: 3200
Here's a shot of a car with blue headlights, so I decided to simply just highlight them, dimming the surroundings and emphasizing the blue color finalized with a 16:9 crop to frame the essential.
2. Lamp
Shutter speed: 1/30 Aperture: f/3.5 ISO: 3200
Here I decided to go with black and white.
The main thing going on here is lighting adjustments and local contrast which pulls a good amount of detail from the snow surrounding the light source.
3. Peeking Moon
Shutter speed: 1/125 Aperture: f/5.6 ISO: 320
This was actually taken the same day as the Moon in part 1.
This was quite simple really: black and white and small lighting adjustments. My first instinct was to crop the photo with 16:9 with the Moon in the middle, like in the above, but then I decided to try a bit more creative solution with a 2:1 crop. I have a bit of a thing for wide-angle shots, they just look really nice to me.
4. Chimney
Shutter speed: 1/125 Aperture: f/5.6 ISO: 250
First thing was to rotate the picture slightly so that the chimney is perfectly horizontal.
The first version was more experimental with a completely different tone, but for the second I kinda stayed closer to the original photo but just making the colors step out more.
I wanted to get the whole range of color from yellow to orange to red to purple, and I was fiddling with the edits way too long – probably a few hours – trying to get a satisfying result. I started over many times when realizing I had edited so much that it just looked way too processed. Sometimes less is more. In the end I managed to get a decent result though.
One thing I just noticed: uploading these images seem to rekt the black shades which look really crap if you look closely. But on my computer they look completely smooth. Don't know what's causing that.
5. Under the light
Shutter speed: 1/100 Aperture: f/8 ISO: 12800
This shot I originally looked as not even a good picture, but then I realized that the composition is fine, and with a retouch it can be a decent one.
Again, I decided to go with black and white so don't have to deal with those weird shades on the left-hand side. The most major part of editing this picture was to tune down the overwhelming brightness of the streetlamp with a grey filter so that it doesn't feel like staring into Sauron's eye. Then just some minor tweaks with lighting and details, the usual.