No, of course, go ahead. I’m mostly here to learn more about DT and how people fix/edit things means a lot!
Thanks a lot! You really tried so many ideas.
I think I like 3rd one best. It looks like a good tradeoff between nice contrast and resurrected whites.
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I had a little fun with this one. How about this:
Except for one, small step, this was all done with darktable…
Not entirely fair though, this being a composite of 2 images 
This is your image with part of a sky/clouds from one of my own shots and it was done using the watermark module.
The watermark module takes an svg as input and darktable does not export to svg so I had to use inkscape to convert to svg, which is the ‘small step’ that isn’t done with darktable.
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Nice. 
Even the reflection in the water looks like it was covered with the same type of clouds you added.
I’m so happy that DT 3.2 would offer much better tonal reconstruction of the overexposed floor tiles! Can’t wait for the final release. Rumored 1month from now.
3.2 is scheduled to be released August 10.
Experience learned that these planned dates aren’t written in stone though, it might be a bit later/earlier.
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My take with ART
a-_V3A0302.jpg.out.arp (13.4 KB)
Log tone mapping, highlight reconstruction/color propagation, local contrast, color correction of sky.
Replacing the sky as done by @Jade_NL is the solution when sky is completely white to save a photo.
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Thanks! Current (a)RT has the best highlight reconstruction of all! Floor tiles look totally nice.
Yeah, when sky is dead flat, you can do what Jade did with 2nd image or do some slight bluish cast as he also did on the first image. Anyway, very nice!
Sorry another non Darktable post. I found that Rawtherapee always had the best highlight reconstruction ever since I started using it in 2007. At that time it was far better than any commercial software.
In ART you can also apply the dehaze module specifically to the highlights and this emphasises any details in the highlights. It is good for bringing out textures in clouds.
On my phone now so don’t have examples.
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Totally agree. That’s why I wanted to see how DT guys process overexposed images, since I moved to DT due to speed reasons.
I still use RT for what is needed and I consider it superior to DT in RAW engine (color noise removal, highlights, capture sharpness, 2nd monitor usage for film strips etc.), but speed/responsiveness is really lacking (also lacks that very useful blend&fade feature for each module DT has).
However, what guys here showed me, future DT 3.2 will see big improvements in highlight reconstructions. Can’t wait to try it!
That’s funny, I find completely the opposite, RawTherapee and ART both run really speedily on my computer, but Darktable is very slow. ART seems to have the best of all worlds to me…
really … ??? Please compare with e.g.
and others!
Hermann-Josef
Well, new DT uses OpenGL a lot, so it should be faster than RT by default.
Still, what I was comparing the most were the files in file manager (lighttable). Switching back and forth, zooming in, previews, developing and going back to lighttable is super fast in DT. Unlike RT where the more files you want to develop the slower and slower the program gets.
My try in ART, mask on the sky, adapted to taste with HSL factors, plus some other overall tools.
_V3A0302.art-2.jpg.out.arp (12.1 KB)
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Wow, very nice! All of the overexposed areas are saved. Thank you!
I wonder how it possible to recover something that doesn’t even exist.
Instead, I miss the tips to take better pictures of the bright sky landscape.
Just because it’s not visible doesn’t man it doesn’t exist, especially in RAW. This image is pure example what skillful editors managed to extract out of badly exposed photo.
The results are different so it is difficult to deduce what the sky really looked like. I don’t know if it matters.
What I asked was what kind of shooting instructions would be found so that the results after image processing would be closer to each other.
as long not each channel is clipped, there’s stuff to use to reconstruct something - at least variances of luminance. In darktable you can use highlight reconstruction with mode ‚reconstruct in lch‘ for this (sometimes ‚reconstruct in color‘ can give pleasing results too)
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