Shooting directly into the sun created a very high contrast image of this mountain scene. The view may have been impressive but the initial image results were far from being usable. After some time I came back to the raw data and made this unusual rendering.
Thanks for the RAW, it certainly looks usable! Would you consider making this a real Play Raw? If so, please put a CC-license on the file so we know we can edit and post, change the category and tag to ‘Processing’ and ‘playraw’ and also please include [Playraw] in your title See an example.
Added a direct download and Play Raw title as requested.
I did not find that ‘straightforward’ processing evoked, for me, the essence of the scene that I had tried to capture. The image that I posted resulted from some unusual processing that I felt was more interesting than the normal.
The title of the PlayRaw reminds me of the story of Hou Yi.
[…] In Chinese lore, when 10 Suns rose from Earth and scorched the fields, turning the world into a wasteland, Houyi shot down 9 of the 10 Suns, leaving the last one alive. […]
You are right of course, on both counts however I do find that the detail loss at ISO 800 is insignificant compared to that at 200 after I calibrated the camera with darktable.
1.photoflow → linear Rec2020 (no clipping) → WB (area, blend) → 32f (A). 2.gmic → invert A (B) ⇒ pnmclahe → local contrast A, B ⇒ gmic → smooth A (guided by B) → discard B → brighten → contrast → sharpen (self-guided) → vignette → sharpen → resize → zoom 100% to enjoy!
Thank you @davidvj for the super interesting material / image. Seems pips have taken quite different approaches, which is IMO always enriching. I personally went the route of {instant combustion neuron tree} @Thanatomanic but less dreamy / soft. It’s a bit of a dark approach, subdued… like if that mountain had some … secrets, don’t know, probably it’s just echoing my plans for murdering my neighbours Maybe I’ve got the Sunday’s Illness
Then G’mic within Gimp. Only unusual step was constraint sharpen from Iain (link below), quite nice filter, reminds me of Jimmy Mcyntyre’s action for PS. Aurora, LCE, DRInc, CSharp, GinTonic, my own LUT ( for personal REF: split chroma and luma and turned down V4) and grain, in aurora I “had” to recur to luma mask, else all mixing opacities and blend modes.
Note regarding size
Normally I don’t post full-size proofs, but as I went through all the hassle (gmic was stoic, diligent and agnostic as always but gimp absolutely shit its pants… ha ha ha, no; it was sad) of a full-size 32bit workflow… well
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See 
Maybe I’ve got the 
