My try using the dng file win dt3.8.1
I like the scene
1 Like
Had some time to put my above advise into practice.
- darktable to create the tiffs,
- hugin to mask and stack those tiffs,
- darktable to edit the hugin output.
@olliwa
That’s very nice! 
@Jade_NL
Thank you! Unfortunately, your edit seems to miss the reason why I was doing this and that’s the blown out details in the sky on the left side. Also there’s still some ghosting in the branches to the right. Generally I think that HDRMerge does a pretty good job here by just picking up the correct exposure instead of mixing it all together.
However I think I understand the positives of this approach and soon I’m about to dig into it as I was in fact creating a bracketted pano of this scenery a few minutes later.
I overlooked that with the final edit, Hugin did a good job with the highlights and shadows. One of the first things I did was have a look at the sky due to the very dark end-result that both hugin and hdrmerge produce (hugin does a tad better job of fully keeping the darks and lights within bounds.). After I was done editing in darktable I did not check for clipping. I did accept the way it looked because a very bright patch of sky is very hard to look at with the naked eye and not having been there I had to guess. No excuses, though: Should have checked!
Here’s a tweaked version of the above with no more clipping whatsoever:
Yes! I noticed that as well. Wind in the trees. This is doable in hugin but a long and tedious task, something you only want to do if your shot is really, really worth it.
HDRMerge does do a better job in that regard with these images and thus might be the better choice here. The problem that I have with it, in general, is the lack of control, something that hugin does provide. Then again you asked for a free HDRMerge alternative 
Yes. And definitely thank you for that! I hope it didn’t sound harsh or anything, I’m really grateful.