Processing RAWs for HDR displays in Darktable

This actually causes more problems than it solves, because the output formats are not unbounded unless you’re exporting JXR - which I don’t think darktable can do.

I still can’t understand why darktable users are so afraid of the exposure compensation slider… There’s this unhealthy obsession with “unbounded” when the reality is that any output format IS bounded except for floating-point TIFF which is really only usable for feeding to another piece of software for further processing.

Back when I did use darktable, I did the following:

  • Adjust exposure compensation so that the highlights are just under clipping on the histogram (shouldn’t need to be much, since fundamentally the input device is bounded too. Highlight reconstruction and colorspace conversion could result in some positive gain that causes clipping but generally not muh.)
  • Disable all tonemapping modules (filmic, etc - sigmoid didn’t exist back then) - they’re not necessary for an HDR display
  • Export as linear Rec. 2020 16-bit TIFF
  • Convert to 10-bit Rec. 2020 HLG H.265 video using Experimenting with HLG and HDR10 for still images - #22 by Entropy512
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