I loose some detail on the arm’s hair though (best noticed while zooming out), but I guess it’s a matter of further tweaking to find the best trade-off - or even masking it out.
I’m a bit cautious to switch exposure for a tone curve because of this
In summary, I’m confused with your approach.
EDIT: Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that it is important to set up the right exposure at the beginning of the pixel pipe because the following modules will profit from a broad histogram (comes to mind the filmic module). But it is also important that this is done in a linear way, so that tone mapping modules can start from scratch. Is this layman’s interpretation correct?
Applied a box filter with edge awareness for demonstration, so of course it won’t be as nice as the bilateral filter as @rawfiner suggested later. Even then, should I tweak its parameters, I am sure that I could come close to something satisfactory.
The curve gives you an opportunity to decide which tones to lift. As for linear v nonlinear, and clipping and saturation, in a raw processor, the devs control the pipe, so although you have some choices, they aren’t many. I don’t typically use dt, so I cannot provide dt examples or give you advice on dt processing.
So you’re saying that if the pipe is fixed - which I believe it isn’tsince DT 2.7 - it doesn’t matter if you start using the top most modules and proceed down below? I got the impression that you should go from bottom to top as a general rule. (ok, sometimes I change the settings of a bottom module after activating many modules above, but I do that with care)
This is one of the main reasons for my hack software, rawproc - I wanted to insert the tools in arbitrary order. I also wanted to be able to omit tools. If G’MIC would have opened raw files without a pipe from dcraw, I might not have started developing rawproc.
