@lightlover hello & welcome! Can you please attach your sidecar file so that others can learn from your edit?
@paperdigits hello, this image started at default values in acr and then it was edited in Photoshop 
Can i upload the psd file?
Hi @lightlover, I think you may have missed some details about this forum… This forum is here to support Free and Open Source software for photographers. So ACR and Photoshop are not really of interest here since they’re not free or open source.
Being Free and Open Source means that we can study and improve our tools, without needing to infringe upon the software freedoms of our users.
Anyone with a capable computer can get and run our tools, and we don’t need to rely on Adobe, Phase One, or any other software vendor to process our raw files.
While I’m glad ACR and Photoshop are working for you, they are not tools we are interested in, nor can everyone here make use of a PSD to learn from what you’ve done.
If you’re interested in switching from ACR and Photoshop to some FOSS tools like RawTherapee, darktable, gimp, krita, et al, we can certainly help.
But we are generally not interested in ACR/Photoshop edits for Play Raw threads.
@paperdigits you’re right, I misunderstood even though I had a suspicion … 
I’ll avoid posting other files edited with non FOSS tools in this section, sorry.
Such a lovely picture. But highlight reconstruction was a pain for me using dt.
Brandon Woods Sunrise 1.RW2.xmp (41.4 KB)
Wow, I see what you did with the color zone module, manually replacing all highlight reconctruction tools/strategy by carefully bending those by hue lightness/hue/saturation curves ! I believe this is the best darktable attempt to recover the blown areas on this specific image we’ve seen so far …
Which rise several questions :
- Is Darktable the less capable software (compared to those used here) at recovering blown-out highlights ?
- Or, is this particular raw file hard for darktable to process ?
- Or, is darktable able to easily recover highlight but we are misusing it ?
technically i have no idea about such things.
my opinion
darktable is no worse than other converters in the area of lights. However, in my opinion, DT is worse at reconstructing the color components.
darktable, apart from the module “global tone mapping” (obsolete), lacks the possibility to work out the tone values.
(see the video in my post - please don't kill "global tone mapping" - #20 by Suki2019)
“Local contrast” can also be used for this, but it is not as effective afterwards. The “tone equalizer” is too soft as a filter to work out structures.
translate from google 
I think for example Rawtherapee might have a better highlight reconstruction than darktable. It definitely has better noise reduction capabilities. I prefer darktable, nevertheless.
I think for example Rawtherapee might have a better highlight reconstruction than darktable.
Try increasing raw white value to 5000 or even 7000. It will reveal a lot more details in highlights. But you will have to fight purple in the sky (in this case) or horizontal/vertical banding. Different raw values is the reason of “better highlight reconstruction”.
What?
Yes, I have done this a few times in the past. Sometimes it helps somtimes not. But I often forget about this possibitlity. I will try more often :-).
delete the sentence. 
simply put, in my opinion rawtherapee has good tone mapping options
DT is still the best converter for me
