I've been using darktable for a few years now and processed a decent
number of photos with it. Over all of that time, the single most
difficult and troublesome thing for me to deal with in darktable is
trying to recover artificially burned out highlights.
(By 'artificially burned out' I mean highlights that are not burned out
in the RAW before the base curve and white balance are applied.)
The obvious way to go is the highlights recovery setting on the shadows
and highlights module. Unfortunately in practice this does little or
nothing to the high end of highlights; they stay burned out even if you
crank the highlights well down into unnatural territory. None of the
other modules I've tried do a particularly good or easy job of this
either.
It's my view that this situation is kind of absurd. Artificially blown
highlights are quite common and it seems crazy that darktable cannot
easily handle them, and especially that it cannot handle them in the most
natural module for the task. If there is something unusually complicated
about handling them in 'shadows & highlights' (which does come quite
late in the module processing list), I'd suggest that darktable add a
dedicated highlights recovery module at whatever point in the processing
pipeline makes the most sense and/or makes it easiest internally.
As for modules I've tried:
The graduated density module? Sort of useful when I have eg burned out
sky, but again it seems to do remarkably little to burned out highlights,
far less than I would expect based on its nominal EV. In fact its nominal
EV seems rather inconsistent; I have sometimes used +EV in the exposure
module followed by the same -EV in graduated density and observed that
the resulting grad'd area does not have the same exposure as before
both modules.
In theory I should be able to fiddle with the applied base curve to
tame the high end. In practice the interface of the base curve makes
it extremely difficult to do this, because all of the highlights are
crammed in at the top left and need extremely fine manipulation to get
natural results that recover highlights. Turning off the entire base
curve 'curse' highlights at the expense of everything else, which is
not really an easy way to go.
(I've advocated for better base curve control before, but yeah, here it
is again. The 'logarithmic' display is not really it, although it's a
bit of an improvement over the linear display.)
The tone curve suffers from the same precision issue and at least
some of the time it seems to have the same problem of not really touching
the burned out areas. It also requires a deft hand to only touch the
highlights (or you get to go try to make it play well with parametric
action restrictions).
The zone system module seems to have real problems getting to *just*
the burned out highlights or even close to them in the highlights;
I have to turn the number of zones up to the max to even get close to
'just the burned out area or really close'. And then it's once again
awkward to select and act on just the highlights.
- cks
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