Luminance HDR - how to prevent highlights from blowing

I’m not sure you’re going to have much luck with this in LuminanceHDR (I’ll play with your sample in a bit).

Is it that the application of the TMO precludes doing any further modifications to the tone curve during the mapping phase? Just thinking out loud here.

There was also a recent post pointing to work that adaptivesamples had done in creating HDRi entirely within Blender (which I can’t find at the moment).

(edit: ty @Tobias for the link):

On a funny side note, I was actually just reading about Pixar doing tonemapping and using wavelets for edge control: