I went deep into painting on this one.
Compressed the dynamic range in RT and then off to Gimp to dodge and burn and paint…
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Welcome @fwolny to the forum! Very nice image. The composition is good with strong foreground interest. The picture is soft though. May be, you could have used smaller aperture (f/8 or f/11 instead of f/5.6), since the subject is static, you did not need 1/500sec shutter speed.
Here is my attempt with RawTherapee. I recovered the highlights. Then used LAB module to inject some color and brighten the shadows and then used the Wavelet module to sharpen and for final touch-up.
_DSC1085.jpg.out.pp3 (12.2 KB)
@fwolny welcome! And thanks for this nice image… here is what I could achieve with PhotoFlow, making a combined use of dynamic range compression and filmic tonemapping, plus some local exposure adjustments and a selectove darkening of the sky:
_DSC1085.pfi (69.6 KB)
EDIT: I uploaded a bigger and sharper version…
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Wow, very nice outcomes and thanks for all the recommendations!
Agree with shreedhar, the image is too soft. Other than that it was quite a challenge to ligthen the trees/trunk and keep the sky as it was. Nice one.
msd you have done a good job. The image is a bit too sharp for my liking and the sky is quite dark which makes it a bit unnatural, but the colours are really nice and you did a great job at preserving the sky. Mine is burnt and I didn’t know what to do to avoid that. Anyway here is my take:
_DSC1085.ARW.xmp (21.9 KB)
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Apply graduated density filter I did (Yoda speak! 
)
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I actually had one graduated density filter applied. The difference between me and @msd is that I had the base curve enabled, it is on by default for all images. @msd applied a highlight reconstruction to avoid the highlights being pinkish, then a -0.75ev exposure. That does the job quite nicely 
Actually highlight reconstruction is turned on by default but its default mode is clipping. To reconstruct highlights in which only one or two of the R- G- B-channels is/are saturated (usually G-channel for Bayer sensors, which is the reason why highlights are usually magenta), you should use highlight reconstruction iop in LCh mode. Then you can use exposure or any other iop which deals with tonal range to bring the reconstructed highlights to visual range.
Thanks for the explanation @msd, I never really played with highlight reconstruction, and never noticed it was enabled by default.
Quick note, iop means image operator, also called module in the Darktable interface (in case anybody is read this without knowing what it means, like me ).
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Thanks for sharing the photo…I recall a video by Harry Durgin where he does a lot of work with High and Low pass filtering on the clouds in a sky…I think you could really work on the sky and bring it out …perhaps using some of Harry’s approach…just thought I would pass it along in case it is of any use to your or others… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0kjSvW93L0
Hello @BigJ, welcome to the forum! We prefer that you shrink your image to a reasonable size ([Friendly reminder] Limit JPEGs to maybe full HD resolution) and share your processing sidecar or steps (we want to learn from one another).
I tried to get some dreamy light here.
Hope You like it
Done with DarkTable 2.6.1
_DSC1085.ARW.xmp (13.6 KB)
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