If you had an overexposed picture, how would you correct it in Darktable?
What module would you use, what would you do?
I would open The Manualâ˘, and search for overexposed: darktable 4.4 user manual - darktable
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First, set exposure for your subject, as usual. Then see if highlight reconstruction is enough, and if it isnât use a combination of tone eq and filmic/sigmoid to see if thereâs anything more to salvage, before finally just letting whatâs left be blown.
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You can post the raw file here on the forum, donât worry about the size. Add a licence that allows publishing âderivative worksâ (technically, an image developed from the raw data is considered as such).
The best advice is not to overexpose images in the important parts. You can spend hours concealing this in post-processing.
Better to pay attention to the exposure right at the time of shooting. This may sound pretentious, but it helps to save time and avoid frustration.
At least I try to do that, but it doesnât always work 
.
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âOverexposedâ is a bit vagueâŚ
If you mean âthe image is too light for my tasteâ, just use a negative exposure correction, perhaps with tone-equaliser to balance different areas.
If, otoh, you have significant zones where one or more colour channels are cipped in the input file, thereâs literally nothing youcan do to recover the lost data. The best you can hope for is an approximation of what that zone could have looked like. And this is going to be very difficult when you start from a jpeg fileâŚ
If you have a raw file, modules used in such a case would be mainly âhighlight reconstructionâ, perhaps filmic. Tone equaliser can also help to re-equilibrate certain zones.
But again, as soon as you have large (or largish) zones with clipped signal, youâre in troubleâŚ
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