Just one photo this time – the first sunrise of the new year, rising over San Francisco.

But there's a bit of a story here, so I'll indulge myself on this one.

Doing photography in the bay area, it's hard not to be jealous of those early morning fog pictures people take from Marin, looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge, at San Francisco, or even just the forest. I live too far away to have the kind of consistency needed to happen upon perfect conditions, but the idea of catching the sunrise from Marin has remained stuck in my mind.

So I figured, with upcoming uncertainty in my personal life, what better way to start the year than to catch the first sunrise with a fabulous view.

Lots of other people seemingly had the same idea, but there was still barely enough space. There was lots of quiet celebration of the new year. A handful of people even showed up on bikes!

At the time, I took a few photos with my phone for quick sharing, and didn't really check how the ones from the DSLR were turning out.

But, once I got back to the computer to edit them, I quickly was reminded of the issue that's plagued so many of my attempts at shooting the sunset – it looks like garbage when I go to edit it!

Previously, I've figured that it must just be quite difficult to get good shots of the sun with a DSLR; that phones have some almost-magic post-processing to make it work out-of-the-box.

But no! It turns out that Darktable's default processing was known to behave poorly on sunsets (and sunrises), and there's a simple fix – just replace "Filmic RGB" with "Sigmoid" flattening, and set "Preserve Hue" to zero. What it looks like is that the existing processing was technically correct but resulted in output that clearly had something wrong. In the case of this photo, it was that the sun was red!

In any case – after making this change, it was like magic! With only minimal tweaking, the sky looked perfect, exactly how I saw it in the moment. And almost trivially better than the one I got with my phone, although preserving much of the same colors!

Afterwards I looked at how this change would impact some other recent photos, and I think it's just plain better – the colors are richer, removing the need for me to bump the saturation trying to capture the essense of the beauty I saw in the moment.

So I think I'll be trying this out going forwards! Really excited about how wonderful it looks.

In short: It was a good start to the year.