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 ").

Outdoor photographers are often confronted with unfavorable light conditions. This often entails too high contrast. Two of the most frequent consequences are blown highlights and deep shadows in your digital images. Overexposed highlights are challenging to repair in digital post post-processing, still darktable offers a decent set of valuable tools as long as you take your pictures in raw (see Jo’s blog post “why you want raw "). Fortunately, it’s much easier to take care of the deep shadows.