Beelitz_043.ORF (13.4 MB)
Hello, after all the work checking topics, articles and videos I still not have a practical guideline for recovering highlights.
With the Beelitz photo and the AGX workflow also in DT 5.5 I#m not so happy with the results.
Is there a step by step way anybody can suggest with this photo, or the xmp file from anybody here has solved the workflow of highlight recovery.
Thanks in advance
Guenter
You didnât attach a photo.
If your raw has big blown areas (sensor clipping), nothing is going to help.
2 or even 3 channels blown, very difficult 
Your photo tries to capture an enormous dynamic range. More than a normal sensor can depicture. So some parts are already blown and some parts will remain in darkness forever. This isnât necessarily bad. Recover as much as you can and try to make the transistions smooth and the overall look believable.
Maybe this helps a bit:
Beelitz_043.ORF.xmp (15,0 KB)
A proper Play RAW including your own edit (like @kofa said), would have been the better choice.
I did attach the Beelitz_043.orf
Did you see it?
Hello,
looks great - many thanks.
I will look at all the steps and hope to understand all the magic 
No, I didnât, sorry. But the others did, and confirmed my guess: your photo has large blown areas. Data is missing, there are no details there. You need to underexpose to protect the highlights.
I did play with this picture, but this is one of the very few times I would say either a fill light in the darkness or a composite of exposures (HDR merge) would be required for the capture. I am defeated with this image. 
At allâŚI took the amp from Popanz which for me is like magic, and added a parametric mask for the left side.
I hope as a novice I can understand all the steps Popanz did
Beelitz_043.ORF.xmp (15.1 KB)
Thanks for all the response
Guenter
Itâs your picture, but I wouldnât do what you did!
You raised the shadows (with a not very well adjusted mask), to a point, which results in artefacts, noise and an unnatural overall look. partly now the deepest shadows are brighter than normal shadows.
If you want to show more things in the shadows, learn to adjust your mask properly or use modules which do the masking for you. Here the colour balance module:
Beelitz_043_01.ORF.xmp (15,5 KB)
You asked as well questions per PM.
Most of these questions I have already answered in other threads.
I know, that these answers are probably hard to find, so I have no problem to give them more than just once. But if I have to answer them multiple times, it makes sense, that others can profit from those questions as well.
Answering any question to my edits privatly would probably on the long term lead to the loss of joy on Play RAW, which I definitely want to avoid.
I hope that this doesnât sound harsh. Rest asure, it isnât ment like that. Ask your questions publicly and I will be happy to answer them as good as I can.
Just for the heck of it I used multiple instances of tone equalizer to recover the details.
Beelitz_043.ORF.xmp (16.0 KB)
Unfortunately a good example why Iâm not that convinced of tone equalizer. It has to be handled with care:
The whole area around the bright sky is ruined. The sky turns from a dark blue into nearly white nearly immediately. And much worse: the areas left and right from the bright sky are unnaturally darkened.
Iâm aware that it was just for showing how far it is possible though.
Anyway, editing a picture has more than just a technical aspect. There is well an aesthetical one. On this photo in my honest opinion the message of the picture get lost with brighening the shadows too far. There is nothing really intersting to show there. A clever crop and a careful editing will give you much more content.
This is no critics or direct answer to @Terry even though Iâm answering his post. This is just because he used tone equalizer, for his demonstration purpose.
Fun to try to recover some of the bitten out parts of daylight, next time two or three exposures bracketed would helpâŚ
Played a bit with the âhighlight recoveryâ module
Lowered the exposure a lot
3x tone equalizerâŚ
colored the sky a bit with color equalizer
lost of color balance rgb and local contrast
frame
My workflow for over exposed, or even very high dynamic range, images is to turn off the tone mapper and reduce the exposure until I can see whatâs in the highlights.
Once you know what you have then you figure out how to âattackâ it. Maybe you keep the highlights and raise the darker parts. Maybe the highlights arenât important (or there) so you let them go and focus on other parts of the image.
The tone mappers crush the highlights and the darks so if you want to use the tone mapper and have highlights you need to adjust the highlight exposure so that they are caught in the tone mapper curve compression.
So, this is where your photo has blown (clipped) pixels â where it was brighter than what the sensor could handle, and where data was irrevocably lost:
Often, the green and the blue channels were clipped, but sometimes even red:
One possible way to edit this - Iâm not particularly happy with it:
If you want to see more from the inside you can also lower Agx contrast to the extremes and add the contrast back using diffuse or sharpen and local contrast. It does not make your sky more blue but looks a bit more natural.
Iâm really very grateful for all the implementations and ideas.
But the research, checking all your settings, and so on, is too time-consuming for my purposes.
Following Uliâs suggestion, I took another look at my latest attempt on a larger screen, and heâs obviously right in his criticism.
Iâll certainly continue to use and experiment with DT, but after watching this YouTube video https://youtu.be/ijfNufEtFOA, I generated an image using different software thatâs perfectly adequate for my purposes. And I did it in 10 minutes.
DT is certainly good for those with a technical interest, but for me itâs simply too overloaded, too complex, and so on.
I hope you continue to have fun and enjoy great discussions here in the forum
My edit took my less than a minute.
Yes, dt has a steeper learning curve. But itâs worth. The secret for being quick is to create your own starting point and concentrate on the modules you really need.
Sure hope youâll do as lots of us discovered something which at first uses can not be experienced. Dt gives you something which is hard to describe, I name it âeditorial freedomâ. And it sure made me happy plenty of times.
But first steps have as @Popanz says âa steep learning curveâ. After that itâs a lot of joy to use.
Whatever choice you make, it will be yours. But maybe youâll have a look here, this site is oriented towards dt beginners: darktable.info â Mastering Darktable
Regards Jetze
Thanks a lot, and yes the Darktable.info by Chris was a good starting point, and also gave me a good first feeling. And also the DTPro preset makes a clearer look to the important and necessary modules.
I followed the workflow from Chris, but with my special problem of the Beelitz photo Iâm again in front of what module, which setting, masking or not and so on. I believe that people have the time over years to learn DT will enjoy working with.
So thanks again, butâŚ
