I was agreeing with you on the CS for sure and I think it is just his screen shot because when I load his PP3 it looks way less exposed…more like yours so it could just be a web thing
Top left: no sharpening at all
Bottom left: RT Capture Sharpening
Top Right: RT Capture Sharpening + a small amount of USM
Bottom Right: RT Capture Sharpening + a small amount of USM + Microcontrast
Edit: for the bottom right (with microcontrast enabled) I would like to mention that in the RT pipeline Microcontrast is applied before USM. So USM enhances the effect of Microcontrast. Would be worth a try to change the order of both in RT pipeline…
Diffuse and sharpen module. Using second order partial derivative equations of anisotropic heat transfer in wavelets space. Also works for dehazing or increasing local contrast. Has 2 different ways of avoiding edges to prevent halos.
One thing to take into account is I used the OP XMP, which overdoes the black thresholding. It still looks good zoomed at full-picture level, and I would advise against pixel peeping to setup this kind of algo (unless you need to assess the technical perf of the algo – but that’s not retouching anymore), since nobody goes into museums with a magnifying glass to count the number of threads of the canvas…
Another version using diffuse/sharpen but also using the details masking (which is available in darktable 3.6) to exclude the sky. Still not perfect for the pixel-peepers but I’m still getting my head around this module:
The dark horizontal line between sunlight and shadow towards the bottom of the image is easy to catch without pixel peeping, though without having used the module, I’d assume that can be avoided. Most instagrammers probably wouldn’t notice it, but this is pixls