Thanks for the xmp. The distant trees look very natural in this version.
Its a bit about shooting darker for sure but its a classic case of axial CA… made extreme by the blown out sky which is even more “extreme” than extreme contrast usually cited in those sort of shots… you can see when you zoom in to those areas it not only has the color fringing but entire branches are a dark saturated blue. You can find many examples of this ie shooting up into a bright sky through the trees showing lens CA…
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The photo was taken using the Canon Evaluative metering mode with the focus point face of the log. What I usually do is shoot in Canon Fv - set aperture if needed and use the EV compensation to try to balance the overall image brightness vs. minimizing the bump at the right edge of the histogram. Maybe, I need to revisit how I do this.
I have never really played with Highlight Tone Priority (D+). Maybe, something I should explore for such situations in future?
GIMP => Colors menu => **Hue-Saturation => B => Saturation => minus, In the subgrid we see the effect of
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Thanks - it is great to know the root cause as I can now dig into the subject and fix the problem for the future. I do appreciate the steer in the appropriate direction. Initially - I was under the impression it was my incorrect / inappropriate use of Darktable tools for this type of edge scenario. I’m happy to go away and study further in this direction.
Ya I don’t know about all those canon modes but if they are not protecting the sky and the sky is important then it is likely time to tweak something… Of the cuff and just be cause I saw it recently …check out the image edited at the end of @s7habo latest video… exposing the foreground would have lost this sky for sure…
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Appreciate the xmp.
Removing the colour cast in this way - I had not considered before. Thanks for the demonstration.
In that image - it was more about the unnatural looking distant trees in both the initial Darktable image and the horrible looking trees in my final attempted version.
The photo theme was more about humans avoidance of the gate.
But if to avoid unnatural looking trees - I need to protect the sky - then that is what I have to do in future
Thanks for the pointer to the video. I have watched many of his videos before and learnt a great deal. Definitely, a font of knowledge and an asset to the community.
That sky & distant trees look good.
I’ll have to look into how to merge the sky & distance with some of the previous demo and see if the best of both techniques can be utilized.
Much food for thought - thanks for your demonstration.
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There one thing i’d like to mention. Areas like the “blown out sky between leaves” in highlights module is often best with segmentation based after combining the small pieces with some “true sky” …
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By “small pieces with some true sky” are you referring to using the retouch module?
That is something I hadn’t thought about before.
No its a version of the HLR module… I tried a large variety of the settings and didn’t get great results…I actually got better results with a mode I don’t often use ie the guided Laplacian… But in this case with this image targeting the blue by other methods seemed to work best in my hands…Although filmic v5 also did an nice job I found the blue stuck around if I used v6 even changing preservation modes…
See darktable 4.3 (dev) user manual - highlight reconstruction
And I think this is a useful piece of documentation, too:
Darktable new highlight reconstruction method user documentation - Google Docs
Can you get anything out of it based on what @hannoschwalm is suggesting…
I got the best results with Filmic v5 and HLR in filmic. I found the midtone slider there cleaned up the blue nicely…
I would be curious… I tried all the masks and played with the sliders to see how it changed the number and location of candidates and also how combining worked but to me it was dominated by the large blown area in the middle of the sky and I couldn’t get it to do much in the branches…
Please share if you have it figured out to improve things…
No, not really. I think in the clipped area we have a white cloud and blue sky. The little patches of sky among the branches are properly merged using the default values. The blob where I placed the mouse pointer is the cloud; the rest is the blue sky.
The main body white cloud is not merged with the little spots among the branches, but even raising combine won’t fix that:
And even with candidating = 100%, only the cloud gets a candidate, if I understand the mask correctly:
Trying to push recovery on the cloud just leads to even worse artefacts:
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My attempt with white cloud.
I leave a white frame to compare with the sky.
20230416_1X1A2465.CR3.xmp (9,9 KB)
The Highlight Reconstruction Module:
Greetings!
Edit: dt 4.2.1
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I’d be happy with that - it looks natural.
This was what I was able to get with highlight reconstruction. The results were obtained by only moving sliders until it looked OK.
Looks a lot better than my first attempt - way upper-above. @kofa 's colour balance seems better.
Every day is a school day. 
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