another variation.
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That’s a nice crop + edit! Bit soft for my taste, but that’s all it is: My taste 
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Thanks to the comments @hanatos, I have worked on the editing until I got this:
Thanks for the opportunity
Cheers
With fresh eyes I see my original result looked awful.
After a long break, I am exploring the image formation topic again. I no longer care about about any kind of theoretical perfection, I have accepted I don’t know how anything works, and have admitted defeat to per-channel curves and am now embarcing them.
Currently experimenting with a hybrid approach: geometric compression (like in my earlier work) as a first step (leaving headroom, say 5x above 1.0), and then using per-channel compression as a finishing step, compressing it down to the final 0.0-1.0 range. This fills out the gamut nicely and I’ve found the results looks better than either approach used separately.
I’m really throwing everything I know at it.
I’ve been staring at images a lot, so I can’t be certain, but I think it looks… ok?
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Very interesting image. Could spend days playing - and probably will !
My attempt (at this point-in-time) with DT4.4.2
5D3_0104.CR2.xmp (37.0 KB)
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Pretty difficult indeed! I find it especially hard to get a nice contrast without an immense amount of posterization in the petals (and posterization of course kills contrast).
I decided to back off the contrast a bit from the initial one that I’d liked and add an instance of diffuse or sharpen (local contrast preset) after sigmoid to gain a bit of additional contrast.
(edit: added better quality jpeg since original one had some posterization from jpeg compression)
5D3_0104.CR2.xmp (16.8 KB)
(darktable master)
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That sounds interesting! I should read back through this thread, but what software are you working with? Something completely scratch-built or modified rawtherapee/darktable/G’Mic…?
Edit:
I thought this would be an interesting one to try the new sigmoid functionality in darktable (running 4.5+1093). I haven’t fully got my head around it yet, but seems to work well even in my hands. 
5D3_0104.CR2.xmp (7.5 KB)
I think yours is better!
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That is excellent, except for the upper stem being completely blue.
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I think my edit from Sept. 2021 is ugly:
So I tried again (to fail better).
5D3_0104.CR2.xmp (9.4 KB)
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5D3_0104.CR2.xmp (12.6 KB)
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Wow, this was a tough one.
5D3_0104.CR2.pp3 (18.1 KB)
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5D3_0104.CR2.xmp (10.8 KB)
