Another highlights reconstruction exercise

[7osema (Josema)]

I’m currently developing some old pictures of mine with darktable. I think this is a good exercise in order to learn how to use the program.

Usually I can recover highlights with darktable pretty good, but I’ve found a picture that is a challenge for me where I cannot find the settings to reconstruct the highlights properly.

The old development was:

And the current one using darktable 4.0.0:

You can see that the highlights in the bottom left of the image are not very well reconstructed.

I would like to see how would you do it.

DSC06656.dng (14.2 MB)

DSC06656.dng.xmp (25.6 KB)

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

[priort (Todd Prior)]

How was the old one done??

[foto (Syv)]

My attempt in b&w.

night-shot.jpg.out.arp (11.5 KB)

1. Not exactly what you were looking, for these photos, art is so much simpler faster and I really like these results.
2. The dng file? Is this actually produced by the camera? or converted by lightroom or something else?

[7osema (Josema)]

@priort the old one was developed a long time ago with lightroom.
@foto yes, back then I converted every RAW file to DNG while importing into lightroom.

[age]

My try with photflow
In my edit I don’t ahve used local tone adjustments like shadows/highlights or tone equalizer so shadows are too much dark and highlights are not reconstructed at all.
Color wise it looks closer to the lightroom version

DSC06656.pfi (63.1 KB)

[david]

I used a blend of -3 to +2 EV with enfuse, nothing else, I ignored the sensor dust spots.

[Jean-Marc_Digne (jmdigne)]

Thanks for posting
darktable 3.8.1

DSC06656_03.dng.xmp (19.0 KB)

[Till80 (Till)]

DSC06656-exp0 - DSC06656-exp-2_fused.tif.xmp (64.8 KB)

Filmulator - enfuse - DT 4.1

[priort (Todd Prior)]

Some module hit you up with halo’s …I didn’t look at the xmp but you could go module by module to find the culprit…

[dirksagwitz]

My try with DT 4.0

DSC06656.dng.xmp (19.1 KB)

[jorismak]

@7osema

You can see that the highlights in the bottom left of the image are not very well reconstructed.

Nitpicking , but this has nothing to do with ‘reconstructing’ right ? ‘Reconstructing’ is for when your sensor clipped and you need to make something of the spots that have information missing.

What you want is the data you captured to be visible , and the problem with your current newer edit , is that the details are not noticable enough to your liking. So contrast around the upper highlights .

(Without looking at the xmp or trying myself right now, my guess is that switching away from the ‘max rgb’ mode of filmic might bring you closer to what you expect .

[dracoroot7]

using filmic v6 the biggest impact on the highlights was choosing no to preserve chrominance and of course using the tone equalizer to bring down the highlights to desired level

edit : and of course choosing reconstruct color in the highlights reconstruction module

20220630_0005.dng.xmp (10.8 KB)

edit 2 : actually don’t even need the highlight module for this image . filmic reconstruction settings and no chromi is doing all the heavy lifting for me

[priort (Todd Prior)]

Rally nice…I had something similar…not as good as what you have managed but I felt I wanted to go back and protect the sign with the P…it gets a bit mangled…and see if i could make it look normal…

[priort (Todd Prior)]

Not sure you loaded the right sidecar…for me its much darker…loaded the edit from your jpg and got the matching result to what you posted…might just want to check…

[dirksagwitz]

I just checked the file and I did also an import from the jpg … both files look the same for me.

[Jade_NL (Jacques)]

@priort

I don’t have any problems loading @dirksagwitz’s sidecar. Tested this using the latest darktable (4.1.0+20~gbaa74228f)

[Zbyma72age]

My version in GIMP 2.10.24 Lab

[priort (Todd Prior)]

Okay maybe just me…somehow I may have chosen somethings different…it was no issue in the end I grabbed what I needed from the jpg…Not sure how I ended up with the darker version…maybe I incorrectly grabbed a sidecar from some version I was playing with…sorry for the noise