In praise of exposure fusion in DT.

Software darktable
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I recently came across this article about exposure fusion in darktable, and decided to give it a try. I have to say, I am incredibly amazed at how powerful it is. Here’s an example of what it can do:

SOOC JPEG, badly underexposed because I was shooting into the sun: P4290352

After edit in darktable with exposure fusion plus some profiled denoise and split-toning for a more golden look: P4290352

Pretty amazing, right?!

Here’s the raw file (Olympus OMD E-M10ii): P4290352.orf (13.4 MB) and the .xmp: P4290352.orf.xmp (5.3 KB)

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, so feel free to give it a try!

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Exposure fusion is great, but not always necessary :wink:

P4290352
P4290352.orf.xmp (11.1 KB)
I only tweaked the base curve here (and some noise reduction + CA removal). I would say this already comes quite close to your exposure fusion attempt.

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Here is the result of a filmic tome mapping curve applied to a linear RGB version:

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Looks pretty good! I think you pushed the shadows more than the exposure fusion did, and so there’s some more noise there (but probably cleaner than without noise removal). The main “wow” factor of the exposure fusion was that it was non-fussy, and pretty.mich just produced a balanced image with “one click.” Of course I tweaked the sliders just to see what they would do :smile: , but the default setting was pretty close to perfect!

@Carmelo_DrRaw I really need to try photo flow one of these days. Great results!