On easter saturday we went to an old nearby quarry to the local easter fire. It was the first time my son saw such a big fire and was allowed to stay up late. Coming through the forest we could see the fires light from afar and the atmosphere was magical.
Looking foward to your plays
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Basic edit with Christian’s DT fork and his base curve module…testing out his latest version also with his “automatch” feature…
You can try the portable version here… Base Curve Module “Hybrid” & ACES - Like (Proof of Concept) - #56 by Christian-B
It has his contrast and texture module too which I didn’t use here …
Base edit keeping the foreground dark for contrast to the fire.
Added a little tone eq
You can take the flames more in this direction with his UCS saturation balance slider… pushed it all the way to soft limit
Here’s my go… using RT… Interesting challenge. Thanks for this! Enjoyed it, and I hope I made a good output. Your son must have been in awe…
My try.
Not entirely convinced with my edit… I want to emphasize the fire, but what does that even mean? Make it so bright it seems to want to jump out of the frame? Or taming the brightness and restore details, but losing impact? And what do I do with the rest of the photo to make it fit properly?
So many questions… Interesting play nonetheless 
This pushed my ability using DT base curve fusion to recover some shadow details while retaining the flame.
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How about a quite warm and contrasty version?
or with some soft glow?
@Popanz Hell yeah, this definitly captures what it felt like in the moment. We could feel the heat of the fire at this distance already.
Hello,
Here is a proposal featuring the two modules I am currently working on in my experimental branch.
That’s the kind of thing I had in mind: communicating the overwhelming warmth and brightness one must have felt. I’ll study this one with interest!
An additional tweak inspired by @Popanz warmer tones.
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Still another attempt brightening the shadows some more using color balance rgb positioned after base curve
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In my eyes not the best idea. I think tere has to be some dark shadows for this picture to work. In your edit it seems like there is absolutly no true black anymore.
Yeah, and besides black, the bright colors are nearing the absolute extremes. For example the sky is not far from pure cyan. Same for red
Adding some more black areas to the shadow and toning down the blue sky a little. But the blue sky issue is probably a drawback of using the base curve fusion to recover the dark shadows. Part of the notorious six issue I suspect.
