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 isn’t at all bad for a 3 minute overall edit.
For some reason. mine are coming out a bit warmer. My usual gimp/nufraw with my three exposures plugin, and g’mic 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 g’mic quick tonemapping, but it didn’t do a lot for me.
And although my approach is ‘quick and dirty’ I still seem to spend large amounts of time exploring different sharpening approaches, and (sometimes) my variant of the old ‘advanced tonemapping’ plugin.
RT current release - see if this works (attached). I’m 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 “pop” (sorry if I’m not using proper terms - I’m still trying to grow my editing — currently at the phase of “i suck” - lol ). But hey this is why we do it - for fun and therapy right?
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.