I’ve been working on my own problem image, of a sunset:
There’s a bright, partly overexposed highlight around the sun, which filmic desaturates into salmon and white:
While the salmon hue is probably physically correct in some sense, this looks profoundly wrong to my eyes. Sunsets should get “hotter” near the sun, and “hot” means yellow, not white, somehow. So here’s my mitigation strategy:
I add a parametric mask to filmic that excludes the topmost 1% of Jz, which lets the brightest highlights clip:
And if the effect is too strong, I add a second instance of filmic with the inverted raster mask of the first filmic, but reduced opacity:
For reference, here are two commercial renditions, from Capture One and DxO, which clearly employ different levels of hue preservation:
