Hello dear fellow humans!
I found this scene a few nights ago and liked the contrast between the outside world and the ‘cave’ a lot, so i took a picture. I tried to draw the attention to the inside, to me it looked a bit like the entrance to another world.
I am interested in you approaches to this image 
DSCF2164.RAF.xmp (50.6 KB)
DSCF2164.RAF (24.8 MB)
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
It looks somewhat like an eye (you even have a catchlight and a pupil in the iris). Nice shot.
My play in GIMP. I did silly things to exaggerate the difference in lighting sources.
Then I looked again and thought let us make it even more extreme!
Hello,
Here is my colourful version, I really like the contrast of this shot. I tried to emphasize the contrast of the warm (dark) light in the foreground to the cold and bright light in the centre of the picture.
Greetings from Brussels,
Christian
I was playing around with the idea of doing a split color balance, where there was one color balance set for the lit area past the interior and another for outside (setting the wall to neutral with the eyedropper), with a mask on balance 1, with the same mask, but an inverse, applied to balance 2 (so the whole image is balanced, but different parts get different temperatures.
DSCF2164.RAF.xmp (15.7 KB)
(This is from darktable nightly; the XMP probably won’t work on the stable release.)
As I used a mask that’s based on the brightness (Jz) and hue (hz) of the wall…
(Hit “c” when hovering the tab to toggle the visualizer for parametric mask modes.)
I could remove the purple that’s in-between the color balance zones, but I thought it was a nice framing (in addition to the tunnel, of course).
And then I hit a bug that caused corruption in darktable nightly:
The error about double CAT being applied is intentional, as I’m using a mask. Normally you don’t want that, but you do when using this technique. Aurélien Pierre had a video covering this technique @ [EN] darktable 3.4 new module : color calibration, get your Christmas lights back in gamut ! - YouTube — specifically the part with the Christmas lights photo.
The inaccurate colors and banding corruption is a bug in darktable. (The preview appears correct.) This happens with openCL on and off. I’ll report it. 
Thank you for all the creative edits, good stuff! 
I uploaded your xmp and it comes in correctly … I edited your two instances moving lots of sliders and then set them back… I could not see any corruption …
I have an nvidia card and using this version of DT on win11
I might have misunderstood what you do to trigger it…
It’s fine until I start changing one of the color calibration modules (there are two; one is masked; the other is using a raster mask based on the other). It’s probably related to the mask? or two color calibration modules?
I’m on Linux with an AMD GPU, but it happens only for this image, whether I have openCL on or not.
Before it glitches, I can do other edits just fine.
