My new try in Black and White. I follow practising with filters and contrast, with the sky I don't get the right point.
Then I've done a mix with layer mask and a gradient on.

Nobody playing?
Let me give a try, with some extreme Gegl operations
Something like an ink drawing, by a fool artist...

...and why not borrowing the idea of a gradient?

to be crazy...

alien-map



gradient-map



odd things, tonight!....

Wonderful and new effects which I didn't know, Dinasset. Thank you so much for your inputs.

Hi friends, I wonder, from a bad photo taken in backlit What can one do? How can we improve it? Here my poor try. That is a real challenge.

another way, using G'mic Local normalization, then putting layer mode on screen



anyhow, your original photo doesn't look bad to me (you know I like darkness!)
also, pay attention to the increasing noise when lightening dark areas...
experiment many tools
as you said, it's a challenge!
but you like challenges, don't you?

Yes Dinasset, that filter remove noise from white zones. Is it necessary to select the zones before or the filter detects the zone?

I just applied that filter on your original, asking G'mic to create as output a new layer on top, then I duplicated the "normalized" layer again and changed the top layer mode to screen; if you see it's still too dark for your taste, you can use colours>levels moving to the right (16 should be enough) the black pointer below the histogram

Thank you so much Dinasset.

let see (later) your new experiments
i must leave the PC now, something to do in my country house...
this evening I'll very probably reconnect on the chat
See you

I appreciate your interest on my outcomes a lot. Thank you so much Dinasset. My try following your advice on the photo. G'MIC - Local normalization - screen mode - colours - levels - and then G'MiC - Repair - Iain's noise reduction. But I've lost the information about water.

Yes, you're right.
So I repeated your steps.
I guess I found some points to think about:
1-when using Levels maybe you adjusted the input dark level to 16, instead of the output dark level.
My indication was not clear enough, sorry Issabella.
2-when using Iain noise reduction you accepted just the defaults, which are normally good for an average image, maybe in your case you could have played with:
2a-reducing first parameter to 2
2b-reducing second parameter to 0
2c-asking for recovering details (50 for all 3 for instance)
3-the new layer could have the opacity reduced to something between 30 and 50
I attach here the steps performed.



Check whether my assumptions are correct

Yes, you're absolutely correct. The settings were by default, as I only checked the swans and not the water. I'll repeat everything tomorrow from the very start.
Thank you so much.

Here's what I've made of the swans:
I'll confess to using Photivo for the following:
Shadow recovery
Texture contrast
Pyramid Denoising
L* curve adjustment

In GIMP:
Rotation to get the adult swan's heads level
Crop to get rid of the unwanted distractions
Clone out stick on the left

Kevin

Fantastic outcome Kevin. Thank you so much for sharing your settings and transformation. Unfortunately I don't have Photivo and I think that I'm still in a learning stage.

This is just desaturated from a colour photo.

Just took the middle out of a photo and did it three ways in G'MIC
dithering

colourize colourmap

Black and white film - agfa APX 100

Here's my swan try in GIMP. I used G'MIC-Colors-Zone System to lighten the shadows. Then I used curves to brighten the low-mid tones and bring out more detail in the feathers. Then I decided the swans were still too dark but the water was too bright, so I ran Zone System again on a separate layer and painted a layer mask to affect only the swans.

Note for using the Zone System filter: When you're brightening the shadows on a too-dark picture, you're probably not watching the highlights. Which is a problem because this filter indicates blown (overexposed) highlights by turning them BLACK. Fix this by adjusting the white point down from 255 to 254 or 253 or lower. Zoom in on the preview to make sure all the black spots are gone. Alternatively, simply run the filter and output it to a new layer, then set the layer to "lighten only." It's a very useful filter, once you figure out where the black spots came from ;-)