@Thomas_Do thanks for providing raw and context and pips sharing their versions, @shreedhar if that B&W was a generous naked woman would be close to man ray’s
Weather seems moody yes, my goal was to try to preserve that moodiness with a touch of happy colours on the boat… that somehow reminded me knife in the water
Then to gimp and gmic, DR increase (split in dark and lights {which was blended in soft light mode and 33% if I recall correctly}), my own LUT (for personal ref BSC-HC-01) with 100% luma weight and half of its colour (was coming in too strong, je je), still had to add a curve to fix bluish shadows. =)
LuminanceHDR output of Ferradans (lower half) and Mantiuk 06 (angry looking sky), masked with gradient in McGIMP and finally colors boost in RawTherapee.
I am actually fine with the clouds. Usually, I would steer clear of sharpening the water, esp. when it is choppy or has a repeating pattern. Very distracting.
@DxO-user I liked that. Could you upload also the sidecar file?
EDIT: There are only three minor issues (again, to my taste), but I’d like to see your settings first.
I’d try to get rid of that blown spot in the clouds.
I first increased highlight compression, but then noticed it affected the overall contrast of the image. I was able to restrain its effect only to the clouds by increasing also the highlight compression threshold. This way, this change had minimal impact on the overall tonality and it eliminated the blown area in the cloud.
Another thing is the dark regions of the bow, that I find a little blotchy (I don’t know how to describe exactly… I think this is not the right word for it…)
I reduced that effect with a second tone curve by lowering the shadows and raising the highlights to restrain the effect, but I guess this had a noticeable impact to the overall contrast, which wasn’t what I had planed at first.
I’m not used to RT and I miss the history showing your steps, to try to find where you first introduced that effect I’m trying to get rid of.
Another thing is the water , I want a more bluish color. It’s difficult in RT since almost all adjustment is globally , and local lab is way too limited. Since I don’t use darktable or Gimp , I have to resort to Affinity or Aurora to do that…