Hey Uli … your approach is better on this one , still show halos albeit not that wide .
BG shows excessive noise or grain … not ideal IMHO.
Image does not appear a lot sharper than the other version posted , so I can only guess that the image was not sharp to begin with , or a rather large crop .
Would love to play with the module , so far no macOS version on the horizon
You are completely right … local contrast requires masking , to make it work for the good , IMHO . Specially the finer things can go off quickly .
Cheers Andreas