During the brightest displays, this will have little effect. Twilight, airglow, diffuse backscattering of artificial light can all effect the color of the sky and with it the color of the aurora you see. Additionally, aurora isn’t opaque, but the sky can be seen through it, influencing the actual color you perceive with your eyes. If there’s artificial light entering the scene from streetlights, cars, town light, headlamps then it’s even more doubtful that the camera’s auto WB will be correct. It constantly changes location and brightness, reds appear and fade quickly, and the illumination of the foreground changes with it. For this reason it’s important to adjust white balance first, or else you’ll end up needing to go back to everything you already adjusted earlier once the color changes.Ĭ olor in aurora is difficult to pin down correctly. The white balance alone can change the entire look of the photo, from the noise profile to the contrast and exposure. ![]() ![]() I’ve saved this as my base profile as “My Default” (profiles are highlighted in blue) and then set that as my default setting. I like working in and exporting in sRGB color space, since that’s what most print labs like, so I change this from the default RT_sRGB in the “output profile” in the “Color Management” tab (highlighted in green). We’re going to adjust the white balance before anything else, so after opening the photo in Raw Therapee go to the “Color” tab (highlighted in red). Then just load that profile with other photos (or edit as a batch). If the lighting conditions don’t change much while shooting you can try editing just one or two photos and save the profile (right button highlighted in black). Three very different lighting conditions make this a difficult edit, and lead to a lot of discussion. I chose this photo as an example because it has a strong foreground element lit by a halogen houselight and aurora behind a thin cloud layer illuminated by a variety of artificial light. Since GIMP doesn’t load exif data from tif images (not the case with jpg) I use exiftool to put it back. I often like to do a bit of additional processing, usually level adjustment or further de-noising using GIMP (or G’MIC) software. You can easily finish an image from RAW as a 8-bit or 16-bit tif or a jpg. The bare-bones tool used in this article is RawTherapee. It’s an addictive world, it may take some time to get to know and love, but you might like it. I’ll never have to pay to upgrade to the newest version and it’s so easy to add user-written plug-ins in GIMP that the software is fully customizable. I feel much better occasionally donating money to the open source developers knowing that it’s going to the developers and not to a massive corporation where the primary focus is on marketing and not on the product. Actually, a lot more useful than Windows or Mac, because with such a large community and customizability that comes along with Linux, you can almost always quickly find a fix for your problems instead of simply sending an error report and waiting for the bug fix to never come before they move on and try to sell you an upgrade to the operating system or program. There’s a huge community base, so it’s pretty easy to find solutions to problems. With Ubuntu, it’s easy to install as a dual-boot, so you choose which operating system to use on start-up. I’m currently using Ubuntu, but there are plenty of others ( Fedora, Red Hat, Mint). If you really want to go the open source route, it might be worthwhile trying a Linux operating system. I have had issues with GIMP being unstable in Windows and have had (almost) no trouble running any of these in Linux. Linux rant – feel free to skip: All of these tools are avilable for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
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