I took this almost 9 years ago:
DSC_4287.NEF (19.6 MB)
Dedicated to Glenn @ggbutcher and the other railway fans 
The lady and the boy on the first seat behind the driver may look familiar to some.
Attaching a LightZone version:
And one I made with darktable back then (using base curves, of course):
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
I fixed those pesky highlights, cropped on the important part of the image:
Very nice little lokey⌠if only I had room in the garage for a lathe and millâŚ
EDIT
Tried something different to get the highlights/darks under control while trying to be quick:
Using enfuse to blend 2 versions: One base edit in RT exposed for the highlights, one for the darker parts. Put the blended result back into RawTherapee and did a few minor edits.
The first one is better, but I do think that the second one isnât at all bad for a 3 minute overall edit.
And here is its brother:
Railway History Park, Budapest
http://www.vasuttortenetipark.hu/
And they have more miniature engines
I went one further than jade_NL!!! I blended 4 exposures derived from Filmulator (+3, +2, +1, and -1) using enfuse - no other changes.
For some reason. mine are coming out a bit warmer. My usual gimp/nufraw with my three exposures plugin, and gâmic local contrast enhancement. The plugin is a quick and dirty approach to merging multiple exposures. In this case, +1.5, +0.5 and +2.5.
Out of interest, I tried gâmic quick tonemapping, but it didnât do a lot for me.
And although my approach is âquick and dirtyâ I still seem to spend large amounts of time exploring different sharpening approaches, and (sometimes) my variant of the old âadvanced tonemappingâ plugin.
My take with RawTherapee Dev and Stuart Sowerbyâs Astia Fuji sim.
DSC_4287-1.jpg.out.pp3 (22.6 KB)
Was fun to play with the colors. I lost a lot of the âpopâ that you guys have when doing so though. Iâll try once more in a bit.
RT current release - see if this works (attached). Iâm gonna try another edit after walking away and looking w/ fresh eyes - I think I can help the greens look better and add some overall âpopâ (sorry if Iâm not using proper terms - Iâm still trying to grow my editing â currently at the phase of âi suckâ - lol ). But hey this is why we do it - for fun and therapy right?
Itâs not necessary to preserve every highlight.
Processed with experimental program, 4600K, 2x contrast, 2x saturation.
Also the wonky angle looks good, didnât see a need for straightening.
I agree with not recovering every highlight: here, the background is not important, and, if heavily compressed, can look artificial. My primary aim was to recover some of the shadows (the 1st 2 passengers being my wife and my son :-)), and make the rest of the image look realistic.
Impressive, how the highlights were recovered in your edit!
Itâs possible to recover the highlights at such level with darktable?
