Indeed. Did not even notice. The spot being very bright is natural: the Sun was right behind it.
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Guilty as hell!
ART 1.20.2
I decided to try 2 different approaches
2023-10-08-14-02-25_P1010723.RW2.arp (11.3 KB)
2023-10-08-14-02-25_P1010723bn.RW2.arp (12.0 KB)
Greetings. Roberto
Ya I have also used the cloning/healing for a weird but of blown sky… Filmic highlight reconstruction offers the blooming to blur it out… but just for kicks and a bit of a different look this one with the sky tweaked using watermark…
Relative
Perceptual
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@Popanz I like your edits the best. I will have to delve into your xmp file. It is a really challenging image that tests the skills of both the user and the programs.
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2023-10-08-14-02-25_P1010723.RW2.xmp (13.0 KB)
My attempt. Did not fix the blown out sun as I think that’s how sun should look like
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Thank you for the play; tricky, very tricky.
I also “cheated” - in my case using a tinted graduated density.
2023-10-08-14-02-25_P1010723.RW2.xmp (10.5 KB)
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I think this recovery of the blown part of the sky is remarkable and way better than the attempts made in Darktable. Is it possible to ‘steal’ this feature and implement it in Darktable? (Not for me, for the developing team)
Well, it’s not exactly recovery; I kind of cheated, using the spot removal tool to clone in adjacent parts of the sky. Darktable already has a spot removal tool, I think, and a very good one for that matter. Thanks, anyway 
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Yes, the spot removal tool in DT is good. But the tool in RT to fill surroundings into a blown spot is better than e.g. found in FilmicRGB - imo. That’s the reason for my wishful thinking.
There was no recovery magic involved. An area near the top-left corner was cloned into (or was used to heal) the blown area. RT did not do any “fill surroundings into a blown spot” automatically.
Spot removal on (from @ThomasM’s version):
Spot removal off:
Here is what was cloned:
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Here is a version where I used the same method as what @ThomasM did, using approximately the same area. I processed the photo with the current development preview (built from master), using tone equalizer and sigmoid (with a smooth-like preset but with sRGB as the space), with a strong highlight saturation boost with color balance rgb placed after sigmoid, as suggested in https://discuss.pixls.us/t/introducing-primaries-feature-for-sigmoid/40450:
2023-10-08-14-02-25_P1010723.RW2.xmp (23.0 KB)
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A usable result with cloning, and a very nice result with the ‘Thomas method’.
Still the efficiency of the fill-in (from the surroundings) in Filmic RGB would hardly suffer from being as good as the one in RT (imho).
You have mentioned the filmic highlight reconstruction several times. However, it is not really reconstruction:
- it does not work with raw data
- has no idea what pixels are clipped on the sensor
- instead of hard (sensor-level) clipping, it works with the white level set in filmic
- its purpose is not really to recover detail, but to smoothen the transition to white.
Darktable has recently received a rather powerful highlight recovery method, but even that cannot deal with the situation where large areas have all channels clipped (unless there are smooth gradients it can propagate into the blown area – but there will be no pixel-level detail, only smooth propagation of lightness and a colour. Check out this thread for (early) examples from Iain Fergusson, who came up with the methods, which were then later made available in darktable as the inpaint opposed and segmentation based methods.
In this photo, it would have had to re-synthesise texture, which it cannot do.
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