I hammer home the point about not clipping highlights with the ETTR suggestion. Also if you push the ETTR too much and don’t clip you can still get very desaturated highlights. That could be a problem for some images. I agree, that I would much rather deal with noise than reconstruct a clipped highlight. However, sometimes the dynamic range of the lighting means even the best of us will get unavoidable clipping.
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@kofa I like that you describe LR exposure merge as an in camera solution. Because I have a perpetual LR 6 licence I defer to it for my exposure blending. I like that it handles RAW files and even handheld shots. What really amazes me is that if there are tourists (bloody photographer’s curse) walking around the scene it can handle that problem as well. LR works most of the time, but even it can have a hissy fit sometimes.
I have played with Hugin a little but not invested enough time into it yet because of LR. I have tried the HDR function in DT with tripod aligned shots and have been underwhelmed by its performance. I am not sure if DT version has improved in that module.
I don’t, but I think you do. 
I rarely do HDR merges; I stitch (hand-held) panoramas. For scenes with a high dynamic range, I underexpose to protect the highlights, and deal with the noise. I don’t think the noise is a serious problem, not even from my 10-year-old LX7 (1/1.7") compact, which is much like the G16 you used in your example.
I feel most of the HDRs I see on the internet are horrible, unnatural and overcooked. If the scene permits and I have a tripod I like to do auto exposure bracketing, process the separate images in DT and output as 16 bit tiffs which I then open as layers in Gimp and blend with layer masks. A gradient mask will often work nicely for landscapes and replaces the need for a gradient lens filter which can be a pain to use anyway.
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Perefect! And the “one liner” worked. Thanks for you support!
Dear Todd,
Thank you for this information. I’m going to take note of this for next additions.
Just to be certain :
1/ = “jenshannoschwalm”
2/ = "darktable.git
3/ = i would find by clicking on the “Pull Request” tab, and then click on the PR I’m interested in, and then I can find him on the top of the next page, after the name. (as Jorismak explained yesterday). Or is there a more direct way to recover the identification?
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Note: if you plan on testing development branches, GitHub has a command-line tool ‘gh’.
It makes checking out the right branch very easy: all you need is the number of the pull request (PR):
gh pr checkout 12345
(Of course, this requires that you git clone the main darktable repository first.)
For next additions , i would just wait until they are in darktable, so in the master branch. Properly accepted as it were.
This is just such a game changer that you go through the hoops to get it early 
.
(For the record, there are still changes / fixes coming in for this branch… and as its still in proposal, it might turn out to be different when and if it finally is accepted … so you are taking a sneak peak at work in progress … So expect things to change and expect bugs).
It’s a style choice , but has nothing to do with ‘hdr’ or not.
Merging multiple shots is to capture a big range of data.
How you squeeze that data back into the limited range of your display , that’s ‘just another edit’.
That overcooked look you can get with a single shot just as easily… And that means you can get a natural look with a multi shot just as easy.
And as kofa said , camera’s of the last decade can often capture more than enough data in a single shot , if you keep exposure low so that you don’t clip. I don’t see the need for multi shot in a lot of cases, and so never do them.
And if i do, combining two shots (one at like -3 and one at 0) gives you all the data you need.
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It should land there during august (this is planned for 4.2) and until now I concentrate on fixes for 4.0.1.
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I currently use the highlight-weighted matrix metering mode on my Z 6 for all my shooting. It keeps most highlights in sensor resolution, but it will let a few things go, like in-scene speculars and strong sunlit glint. For those I’ll invoke highlight-reconstruction right after demosaic, mainly to get rid of the magenta caused by the white balance skewing of those pileups.
The consequence of relying on this metering mode is the need to pull up low values, and not in a consistent way. Thing is, the Z 6 is pretty forgiving, in that I rarely need to use a denoise on my pulled-up shadows. With my D7000 I messed a bit with two-image HDR amalgams, but it’s that hassle that ultimately convinced me to bite the bullet and get a better camera.
Here’s one rather extreme example. Twilght, looking to the southwest, shot from a moving train so no opportunity to HDR:
License: CC-BY-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
The ground lighting appears a bit wonky because it was, quite dark compared to the sky. Indeed, the linear data has the sky nicely exposed and the ground is almost indiscernible black. it took a decidedly non-linear tone curve to push all the data around to get this rendition. But, no highlight reconstruction…
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OK, I’ be patient.
Possible to share the raw?
Sure:
DSZ_1908.NEF (26.9 MB)
License: CC-BY-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
Nice one and definitely not exposed to the right
Heh, I thought it was a scene at late dusk.
Generically, twilight is about the illumination, that being sky-scattered sunlight from the below-the-horizon sun. “Dusk” and “dawn” are instants in time, so to speak, having to do with the sun’s instantaneous relationship to the horizon.
And yes, I care deeply about the leap second Meta so enthusiastically wants to do away with… 
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