while playing around with darktable in the last weeks, I came across a few pictures that I still cannot develop to my satisfaction whatever I try. Until now, I work with Lightroom 6 and here it is absolutely no problem to recover the shadows and highlights with simply two sliders to their extreme.
Can you tell me if and how to achive a similar result in darktable?
My attempt DT3.8. It is quite difficult since there is very big area with blown colors (no informations). LR highligh recovery works pretty well here.
EDIT:
my approach (assuming that this was taken before sunrise):
remove color cast (in the greens of the trees and the bush near the piste)
Adjust exposure/black
then just use the “compression strong” preset in tone equalizer
hello
quick test, but i get vertical line artefacts in the blown out whites. i tried to smooth them with filmic. if i smooth them completely i seem to loose the color
an easy starting point should be to set the method to “reconstruct color” in the “highlight reconstruction” module. then to play in the reconstruct window in filmic
The trouble is that highlight recovery (of blown areas) is one of darktable’s weak points. Those small clouds above the trees are present in the image, and are recovered nicely by Lightroom. They can also be made visible in darktable by dropping the exposure and switching highlight recovery to reconstruct in LCh:
And just to show how much luminance detail we have (can keep) in the sky when we hit filmic, here’s a screenshot of filmic’s highlight reconstruction mask (adjusted to demonstrate detail here, not for actual highlight reconstruction):
Here a take with alot of color from filmulator. Increased brightness of the shadows so the overall image could be taken down a bit, along with drama 50 and highlight recovery 2
I apologize for using RawTherapee … using Colour Propagation as Highlight Recovery mode along with -1 EV Exposure Correction gave quite good results for the blown sky.
