Looking good. Any chance this can be added to RT or will be distributed as a stand alone package?
I don’t have the skills for that, I’m afraid.
There are several great RawTherapee developers who I am sure would love to help out if you share your code.
@chaimav His source code is always available on github/gmic-community. For it to be added, someone on the RT team with the skillset would need to understand gmic syntax. He also made a description of the algorithm in a post above.
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What is the first frame showing? No highlight reconstruction or any of the available reconstruction methods? A lot of reconstructed area, but also a lot of strange artifacts/patterns. I in this particular case, if I had to chose, I would pick the clipped version. Looks like an extreme case though. I’d be interested in sunsets with a clipped sun.
This is synthesis of information when all three channels are clipped. It can’t be compared to other available methods because they don’t do this.
It probably isn’t useful for a clipped sun, but I have tried it on clipped clouds and it can give goods results.
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Oh! Then I would say it’s very impressive.
Clouds recovery would be even more interesting.
Results from the latest modifications ~ 1 stop of highlight synthesis on clouds.
Thanks to @garagecoder for his local boxfilter in GMIC 
Edit: Previous example with new modifications. Highlight synthesis and my custom colour propagation.
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Had some fun with trying my highlight synthesis with images from other threads.
Top; RT. Bottom; Mine.
From:
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Excellent results!
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I’d be so thrilled to see this in Dark Table !!
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@Iain could you try recovering highlights on this photo:
and this photo:
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Here you go. Please bear in mind that these images are not in a calibrated colour space. That is, I just use the RAW RGB values. EG The problem with over-saturation of the blues would still probably happen with normal colour management.
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Thank you! Amazing. Simply amazing.
I wish this was implemented in Darktable. Over-saturation could be solved by the color calibration module.
You can try it now:
GIMP → Filters → G’MIC-Qt → Testing → Iain Fergusson → Iain Highlight Synthesis
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@Iain and i have been working heavy on a darktable implementation of his ideas, many things had to be implemented in a slightly different way or required new stuff in dt. It’s already usable with good performance (on my 8core E-2288G the algo takes <100msec on the selected image), some issues remaining but we both are confident we find a good solution.
Here is a screenshot, no filmic applied so no interference from there, slightly dark for better view of the highlights, just default color management.
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I’m telling you this is the best darktable news I’ve heard in a long time. 
So looking forward! Handling of blown out highlights has (for me) long been the achilles heel of dt. “reconstruct in LCh” often does too little and “reconstruct color” has a very high chance of really nasty artifacts (such as pink striping/patterns). How common are strange artifacts like those with @Iain 's color propagation method?
Lastly, is there any chance whatsoever of this ending up in the 3.8 release? 
Super nice to see this heading towards a dt integration! Any branch or PR up that one can try out?
No. 3.8 is already in feature freeze