This is how far I was able to go on DT 4.0.1
But I really like the edits of @spidermonkey and @7osema
Out of curiosity - I did put the file in Lightroom Classic. But this is without any modification - simply import and export. And the items of interest to me are the blown out sunshine and the mountain below it.
Looking at the results from @spidermonkey - sigmoid based I am very interested to see the final product when it is released.
Slight sidetrack from the subject. Adobe developed interesting AI based masks in Lightroom (subject selection / face detection etc.). While I do appreciate the masks in DT - If somebody has the knowledge how to do that - it would be quite a benefit (if ever - I expect it maybe a huge undertaking).
As far as I know, both sigmoid and inpaint highlight reconstruction will be available in 4.2 release.
I ended up having to do very little to the image to make it look good, so credit should go to the developers.
I tried one of the weekly windows builds of 4.1 using a different config folder and it all behaved nicely (except for exporting this file - perhaps because it is fuji).
Just to clarify, I think @hanatos 's screen shot is showing the new application, vkdt, not darktable… but that is about the limit of my knowledge - except that it is fast
Fun to see such good results with the sigmoid module @spidermonkey !
And then the Lightroom and ON1 results to compare with
My observation and not from this is: how would I do a edit with a visible sun disc with the sigmoid module as my display transform? That will require some dynamic range editing to bring the neighborhood around the sun down in exposure while not making the foreground black. Is this possible with the tone equalizer currently?
Rgb levels won’t work here, especially in from of sigmoid as that module expects bounded display referred data. We need to work with methods that change the exposure locally. Tone equalizer, masked exposure, graduated filter, contrast in color balance rgb, etc.
I reduced the edges refinement to very low to avoid banding
and adjusted the smoothing diameter to get a balance between ugly banding or the sun disc being smoothed too much.
Two silhouette approaches, one with filmic, one with sigmoid. For both, I found the reds overwhelming, and pushed them back using the simple channel mixer preset of color calibration. I used a separate instance because I found it gave nicer colours; if memory serves me well, and I understood correctly, on the primary (chromatic adaptation) instance, the R, G and B channels are not really R, G and B (see Color calibration - colorfulness - #17 by anon41087856).
I do find it interesting that you can get the black point in this file but not the white point data that I could see… I wonder why?? I thought about your silhouette approach. If I go as dark you did I like a bit more dramatic sky in the background. Looking at my two earlier attempts I made a crazy saturated one but I liked the whimsy of it and the second one I tried to get some sort of sun flare… I went back again and went for a combo of some foreground silhouette with a more desaturated washed look and keeping the accent of the red flag that disappears if you go too dark… Lots of ways to go with this photo…
In DT I can’t find the the guided Laplacians in the highlight reconstruction module with this image. Does it not work with this raw file type? I do have good results with ART with this image.
