Clahe is deprecated, the new local contrast is called bilat.c and uses local laplacian on a multi-resolution pyramid as default because, indeed, the bilateral filter is anisotropic and does not behave (especially when used in Lab…). Also, in this particular case, the bilat module is put at the end of the pipe, aka when we don’t care about light transport anymore. Same image without colour balance and local contrast:
Everytime I see something bad when the theory says “it should work”, there is indeed a programmer-induced bug.
Probably because your clipping results in slope/curvature discontinuities of your transfer function between layers (which should not be a problem in linear space).
Means broken algo with lucky parameters. There is no excessive EV shift, just EV shifts that makes the flaws of the method pop out.
