Guys, you’re awesome!
I literally can’t believe this was solved so quickly and with such an amazing results both in DT and RT.
I’ll probably be back with more questions as I move my workflow to DT but for now I think that I have everything that I need and that it works (as far as my testing so far) so I’m ditching LR effective immediately.
One observation, Darktable seems to be quite technical. Don’t change it. I’ve been editing for quite a few years and never thought about how the underlying thing actually works and that seems to be the reason why I was stuck now. I’m excited to learn it all now
Hmm, I could have sworn I saw something about the sliders in RT DRC not doing anything, one thing to keep in mind (this was the topic of some recent discussion on RT’s UI) - it’s possible to adjust a module’s sliders when the module is still turned off.
Also RT has at least two different approaches to tonemapping, one is literally called tonemapping, the other is Dynamic Range Compression - I personally prefer the DRC tool.
In case you are open to other possibilities, here is what I could achieve with PhotoFlow. The starting point is a TIFF file produced with RT and the “neutral” profile, because I have just noticed that PhotoFlow suffers from the same artifacts as DT when reading the HDRmerge DNG.
FYI PhotoFlow processes the image using layers (instead of the modules of DT and RT), and is therefore closer to Photoshop and GIMP. The whole processing is non-destructive, and layers can be associated with opacity masks for local adjustments.
Here is what I could achieve in about 30’, trying to get close to your final result (I’m not totally satisfied by the way the sky turned out):
If you want to open the pfi file, you will need a version of photoflow from today or newer. For Linux you can use this AppImage package. Just make it executable and run it.