dt 4.0 highlight reconstruction with guided laplacian

Ya no magic bullet esp for a large swath like that and I think in a recent video AP did he shows the GLP mode and what it can and cannot do and it is going to add in surrounding color when used on large area in a way that generally is not pretty so its more for those special situations with lighting and that sort of thing as far as I understand it…

Well, I usually get ugly artifacts with that setting, so do check the effect… (not sure what the cause is, may be camera dependant) My first pick is “reconstruct in Lch”.

In general, large areas clipped in even one channel are difficult, with two clipped channels its almost impossible to recover color (you might get some texture), three clipped channels => hopeless (note: large areas, for small areas like lights lack of detail isn’t a real problem.).

I agree here with @rvietor. The “reconstruct color” mode is notorious for maze-like artefacts especially if a) the clipped regions are larger than something “pretty small” or b) more than one clipped channel is involved.

Also, you suggested a clipping threshold of 1.25. This is almost ever simply not correct, it will just disable the chose algo to work correctly. Please note, there is the mask button besides the threshold slider, it will show you if there are any clipped data to be processed and what color planes are involved.

The exceptions from “almost ever” are just a few:

  1. you have set the whitelevel in rawprepare to something too low either by “you did it this way” or the library getting the value (either rawspeed or libraw) did it wrong.
  2. your color temperature settings are vastly wrong on some reason.

A last comment, getting rid of the color cast (mostly magenta in natural light) is just one point you want, point two would be: what details can we reconstruct by the algo (there are often some details availble in unclipped channels)

I didn’t say this is something to always do. On the contrary , i explained why I did in a long post above step by step.

I said that the easiest thing to try is 'one of the modes and see if you like it’s, and that the ‘not easy’ part begins if none give you a result you like. Ofcourse , the artifacts for reconstruct color falls under the ‘do not like the result’ category .

And the threshold i also explained, that IN THIS CASE I could raise it because it seems to give something back, and I raised it to just under the point where the purple disappears. Of course this is never precisely the case. Of course there is not one recipe for everything, and I never stated something even close to that.

I say that the first steps to try ARE very easy and not hard to grasp / learn. Try lch mode , try reconstruct color mode without altering the defaults (see, I even mentioned that ) just to see if you like the results and if it fixes your problem.

As I also stated , there are many ways to try to tackle this , and some might prefer one over the other or some might work better for some pictures … But if you want something easy, the first steps would be that. If it works , nice. It it doesn’t , you have to try another approach.
Your new highlight recovery will also be in this ‘easy to try’ list with the start settings you mentioned yourself… But for most of the users here that is still unavailable.

So, to the person that said ‘glad i did not miss anything easy’… With a smile i say 'well you kinda did, because reconstruct color works just fine for this image '. And that IS an easy thing to try . No, not for everyone And not THE solution… But as a first step to try, lch and color are the first things to observe at default settings. It only gets harder from there .

Please don’t feel offended by my comment. How to handle highlights is sometimes really tricky if you don’t want the dull and flat way we currently have by default in dt :slight_smile:

Together with @Iain and @garagecoder we will likely do some video chat specially about this topic - would be happy to see you there :slight_smile: and there also will be some sort of manual.

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I stand by what I said… And I get more than a bit annoyed when only one or two sentences from a post are read and replied to, taking it all out if context.

Yeah, well, I didn’t see you warn about possible bad effects of the “reconstruct color” option. So I added that experience.

But if that’s how you feel about it, I guess the best thing for me is just to ignore you, so I won’t be tempted to add info to yours.