Darktable - remove dark blotches (what are they?)

[gadolf (Gustavo Adolfo)]

@Thomas_Do

I find you could get somewhat get better results when increasing brightness by using a tone curve instaed of the exposure module.

Interesting.
I moved the exposure module up the pipe (after denoise bilateral), and it gives similar results to yours, regarding noise:

I’m a bit cautious to switch exposure for a tone curve because of this

@afre

Exposure is basically the doubling and halving of linear intensity. It is the easiest to understand because it coincides with camera adjustments of shutter speed, aperture, ISO and metering.

In summary, I’m confused with your approach.
EDIT: Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that it is important to set up the right exposure at the beginning of the pixel pipe because the following modules will profit from a broad histogram (comes to mind the filmic module). But it is also important that this is done in a linear way, so that tone mapping modules can start from scratch. Is this layman’s interpretation correct?