Thanks, all for the friendly replies.
I’m experienced developing images in Darktable. I work with a few thousand selects each year in DT – essentially everything you find here has been processed with DT.
I’m new to playraws – that looks super fun. I’ve uploaded one here.
My question wasn’t “how do I mitigate these clipped/saturated halos”?, but rather, “Why is it happening at all?” i.e., quantitatively, what’s making it happen?
Even if disable filmic and highlight reconstruction, then pull back exposure, the halos remain highly saturated in blue – I don’t think they should, even quantitatively, given that the SOOC preview handles it so cleanly and that reality doesn’t show anything of the sort, even through the viewfinder.
For those who asked me to give sigmoid a spin, here’s the screenshot (using the playraw file)
It appears that some of the emphasis is coming from the color-calibration module.
Filmic disabled, exposure rolled back to avoid output clipping, color-calibration on:
Filmic disabled, same exposure, color-calibration off (note how much less-saturated the blues are):
Thanks again!