Thanks for a GREAT testcase image to use when working on trying to improve the behavior of darktable’s exposure fusion module.
I’ll be posting some examples/comparisons in a separate thread later today (as my primary intent there is to compare the results of making changes to one step in a minimal pipeline, and comparing to that to some other single-module approaches). The outside highlights definitely present a challenge as far as preserving them without washing them out. The tone equalizer someone else is working on provides much better results in those regions, but at the cost of the shadow areas having highly unnatural colors.
More later today in a separate thread, I’ll reference this one when I put it together.