Thanks for the tip on HDRmerge - I had not seen this tool before! I have used other HDR programs like LuminanceHDR and Photomatix in the past, but I don’t like that they require the tonemapping to happen outside of Darktable (since often I can’t create as good of an image with those tools as when I use Darktable), so this seems like a significant improvement since I can then process the DNG normally with Darktable after generating it with HDRmerge.
I took a set of 3 bracketed images (0 EV, +0.67 EV, and +1.33 EV) that I shot handheld, merged them with HDRmerge (using the Darktable plugin), and then processed the resulting DNG and the 0 EV image with the same history stack. The results are below, showing substantially less noise in the shadows with the DNG (left) than the 0 EV image (right):
With the original images, if I wanted to recover that much detail from the tree using the +1.33 EV exposure, I would get significant highlight clipping:
Here’s the full DNG after processing with the scene-referred workflow:
Given this experience, I feel confident that I can shoot bracketed shots handheld (in situations where there is enough light) and use this method to create a DNG RAW with greater dynamic range; this is great!