Yeow, that was tough. The “thing” seems to be to get the halo around the sun to blend, rather that just blob out.
I tried RawTherapee first (don’t code on me, @Claes… ), but I’m not color-managing it yet so what looked okay in-program didn’t look the same exported.
So, I reverted to rawproc, opened it with dcraw ProPhoto colorspace and gamma, and build a rather challenging curve to do the “thing”. Bit of saturation, then resize/sharpen for output to sRGB colorspace. Let’s see how it looks out there:
I think one of the problems in your attempts is that you lose a lot of detail to noise reduction. Curves + a bit of local contrast should get you pretty far already. With that said I always struggle with the local contrast in RT.
Didn’t do anything to it, from all I can tell it’s still there. And looking at the image again a bit after editing, I guess I went a bit too crunchy and contrasty but oh well. It was about enhancing detail after all.
I just curve-dragged it into clip oblivion. Above a certain point, everything is just white…
Seriously, I’ve found that images with saturated pixels require such treatment if you do your processing “by hand” - white balance, in particular, separates the saturated channels, and the only realistic way to corral it is to set the white point at the lowest of the histogram spikes.
I noticed that this thread has been tagged #play_raw. If this is something that you want @Chymera, could you also supply a license for your images? (Unsure, since you weren’t the one who added the tag…) See: PlayRaw stuff to keep in mind.
Tough one. I did use a Nikon camera for a while. A number of people use Nikon’s raw converter and export as tif for further work. Nikon use an unusual method of converting raw files. So having been there before and not being able to get a conversion I liked from RT I used Ufraw as it has the same facility Nikon use and exported a 16bit tif. Light into the lens has fogged the shot so used Fotoxx for further editing. Lastly add a bit of chroma via RT.
Sorry it’s not an RT solution but without the facility the first curve from the left in Ufraw offers I don’t think this sort of result is easily possible.
After a first export and shifting directly between the out of camera image and mine it was apparent that the camera is adding some local contrast. So i experimentend with the radius until I got a similar result. The radius can kinda be seen at the transition sky to mountain on the mountain part.