One of the remaining shortcomings of digital cameras is their rather low dynamic range in comparison to analog – especially black-and-white – film. Scenes with strong differences between highlights and shadows are very difficult to capture. Even if they are exposed properly with no blown-out highlights they will too often only give acceptable results after extensive post-processing.
Fortunately, darktable is progressing with a high pace. Some days ago I wrote an article on how to recover shadows with a technique using lowpass filter plus blend mode (" Using lowpass filter to recover shadows "). In between a new, even better module called “shadows and highlights” was integrated into darktable, that obsoletes this technique.
