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:
However, later they are smoothed into the sky.
This is where color propagation methods of reconstruction are helpful. See recent discussion here: Guiding laplacians to restore clipped highlights
You could try the “color reconstruction” module even though it’s not in an optimal position in the scene referred workflow.
You could also try color propagation method in RawTherapee for comparison, even if that isn’t a solution to your darktable problem.
The transition from blue to red does not look nearly as good as with Lr, and the clouds are gone.
Here’s my attempt – I’m not satisfied with that one, either. Lost much of the saturation, got a bit of the cloud back.
PK1_3540_01.DNG.xmp (8.9 KB)
Edit: increasing the opacity of the local contrast module to ~35% gets more of the cloud back:
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):
Yeah, I would consider this a perfect exposure-to-the-right… not like it’s that important on a K-1 not at base ISO though.
Here’s the raw histogram:
And Filmulator’s result, which is completely artifact free recovery to my eyes.
(highlight recovery 2, exposure comp -1.5)
The last one from me, promise – a trick from @s7habo : local contrast in multiply mode. Kind of ‘overdrive’. 
PK1_3540_04.DNG.xmp (10.9 KB)
Had to get creative, using tools not really designed for the job.
extreme-highlight-recovery-PK1_3540.DNG.xmp (15.6 KB)
dt 3.8
After reading the last posts I also tried local contrast on top of my Extreme Highlight recovey in darktable - #4 by bilddateien and it looks like this:
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.
Yeah… OK… I said no more from me. But then I came up with this.
I added 2 more exposure module instances:
This boosted saturation too much to my liking, so I reset color balance rgb to use the add basic colorfulness preset.
Yes sorry for not using darktable previously. Here a darktable version with the intent of making it look like your lightroom file. Used filmic rgb, shadows and highlight and saturation
Well, it’s a Play Raw
And this is my attempt using DT.
With the scene referred workflow, adjusting the threshold for highlight recovery in the Filmic RGB module is helpful.
I have RawTherapee’s highlight recovery algorithm through use of the librtprocess library in rawproc, so I decided to see how that would go:
I don’t have the nice local contrast tools of the “regular” softwares, so there was only so much lift i could give to the shadows before the sky went white, and even then I had to introduce a small bit of HSL saturation to keep the sky from going too purple-ish when I tone-curved.
My current metering strategy sometimes allows very high-energy highlights to blow through sensor saturation, and I’ve found the RT recovery algorithm to mitigate those quite nicely.
