Video tutorial: restoring overexposed skies in darktable 3.8

Software darktable
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I made a quick tutorial video on how use darktable to I restore detail and color in skies that have been RAW overexposed. Hopefully someone finds it useful. Or someone can tell me I am doing it wrong. I know there are quite a few different ways to do the same thing, so I’d love to hear alternatives too. I don’t have YT, but put the video on Flickr and FB:

[Darktable Editing Tutorial: Fixing Cursed Skies | Here is a … | Flickr](Darktable Editing Tutorial: Fixing Cursed Skies, on Flickr)

It seems the video will embed automagically, or try the links.

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Great video but I find the background music very distracting.

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Brilliant. Question: why not use a mask on the highlights with color balance rgb? That would prevent the blue cast on the shadows and midtones.

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Aren’t highlights already masked in color balance rgb? we can also tune fulcrum and fall-off

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Yes, but in my experience the default mask is not very selective; if you push the sliders you’ll see the effects spilling into the entire image, just like in the video. So, I’d start by tuning the mask as you suggest, and if that is not enough, then use a parametric/drawn mask.

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Regarding the sky color… Here’s another nice approach from @s7habo: Darktable Episode 47: contrasts in highlights 2 and camera jpeg look - YouTube

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Pretty much exactly as you did you can also slide the mid tone sat up a bit in filmic and then shift the latitude (linear mid portion) way over to the highlights…This shift the desaturation curve over and sometimes gives you a really nice bump in the sky…

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Thanks for that comment. Audio mixing in Kdenlive is not my specialty, especially when using a lo-fi narration track. I will pay more attention to it in the future.

I mentioned that, but I maybe cut that snippet out when editing the video. I just wanted to show a quick fix. I think a drawn+parametric mask on the sky would be best for sure if I was spending more time on it.

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