I am struggling with a number of photos like this one to properly use either the highlight reconstruction module or filmic’s highlight reconstruction to handle the small clipped parts of these clouds; it seems no matter what I do in filmic, I end up with this blue-ish tint:
Can someone show me how to more skillfully use highlight reconstruction for this type of situation and make the recovery white? I’d appreciate any other suggestions on this photo too. Thank you!
Hi @garibaldi,
the new highlight reconstruction option “inpaint opposed” works perfectly on this image.
It is already available in the master build. I would think it will be available in the next release? (just me thinking I have no inside how the releases work )
Notice that the xmp with the Sigmoid version will probably not open in darktable 4.0.1 or older.
Other than tone mapping and HLR, they are more or less the same.
Since it is on master, it will be part of 4.2. The only scenario for it not to make it would be q revert because someone finds a major issue. That’s extremely unlikely at this point since we have been using it for a few months now. Because how much better it is over the current default, it will be the default in 4.2.
The while level for your camera seems to be wrong. Turn off highlight reconstruction, turn on raw clipping detection, and lower the white point until the magenta is marked as clipped.
Having the wrong raw clipping value impacts all highlight recovery methods.
If you are on darktable 4.0 or older, try highlight reconstruction with recover in LCh (but disable color calibration and set white balance to as shot):
Or, if you are on at least 4.0, you can try keeping white balance as camera reference and keep color calibration enabled, and use guided laplacians as your highlight reconstruction method (but this time, it did not work for me).
If you are on the development branch, use inpaint opposed as the recovery method (it is the new default):
Great answer…even with the default white level …things are fine as long as you are using legacy wb and not clip highlights with the modern wb ie color calibration… Going to legacy wb and a touch of tone eq totally restores that small segment and no blue/cyan stuff…
The work done with the new HLR to make it compatible and mostly free of this sort of things is nice…
Rawspeed has a single value of 13653 for the Canon 50D
RawTherapee has different values base on the ISO. For the 320 ISO, it uses 12700.
All 3 are different (ExifTool, Rawspeed and RawTherapee).
Combined with the test Kofa did, I would use 12700 on this image.
OP, for other ISOs, this is what RawTherapee has. You can create Auto Presets in dt to adjust the white point based on these.
Today I learnt something new about DT. I opened this image in DT and had the infamous magenta highlights in the clouds, I turned on the raw clipping detection option, adjusted the white point value until the magenta areas were revealed as clipped. I turned off the raw clipping detection and the image looked great. What a simple fix.
I then tried the method on another picture with very bad magenta cloud issue. Again the method worked by just lowering the white point until the magenta clouds disappeared. However, this new image needed further highlight reconstruction to restore the blue sky and cloud detail. I experimented with all the options available in the current Windows weekly build. Only the inpaint opposed and the segmentation based method worked well.
Thanks for the hint about changing the white point. It is easy to adjust and needs to become part of my go to fix if I see magenta highlights.
I think you can do this but really I don’t think it’s a routine editing tactic. If the value is correct as expected by the camera thing are generally fine. In DT these things have recently been looked at and addressed as the move to scene referred and modern wb didn’t really play nice with in particular the default clip highlight mode. In many cases I find looking at all these play raw files in older versions that using the correct white point and legacy wb was enough to make thongs behave. Now with inpaint and segmentation it’s even better
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