Try to turn the thread back from all the over-the-top HDR look (meant tongue in cheek), back to the original ‘raw therapee’ look from the OT:
DSC08448.ARW.xmp (17.7 KB)
- white balance to camera reference (default scene-referred modern workflow)
- turn highlight reconstruction off, because nothing is clipped in the raw data
- raise the exposure till the overal train-tracks and all look sort of where you want them. Yes, the hightlights looked clipped-to-sh*t right now, but that’s filmic’s job.
- Color-calibration with pretty default settings (‘as shot in camera’) (scene-referred modern default), but raise the ‘gamut compression’ up high just to lazily combat it if it occurs
- enable filmic, go to the ‘look’ tab and raise up the ‘latitude’ to make sure it doesn’t desaturate shadows/highlights (too quickly)
- then, in filmic → go the scene tab and lower the ‘white’ till the orange glow has a look you a sort of OK with. If you leave it a bit higher, the middle of the orange-glow can have that white glow in it (which I actually like) but looking from your RawTherapee example you want it to be almost-completely-orange, so lower the filmic-whitepoint more till you’re OK with it.
- In the look tab, raise the saturation till it looks like how you want it.
Note that I have filmic at it’s default ‘RGB power’ mode this way.
Then, finishing touches:
- Unrelated to the tone-mapping, I add ‘defringe’ with default settings, add ‘sharpen’ with default settings and add ‘denoised profiled’.
- Denoising is set to ‘chroma’ blending mode, to only apply color-noise-reduction. I increase the strength a bit and lower the ‘preserve shadows’ till the blotches in the (deep) shadows are just about gone.
- I also set the demosaicing to VNG4 because I seem to prefer it in ‘busy / noisy’ shadows.
- Then I add a ‘local contrast’ with default settings, just because I almost always do it after filmic.
- Then, I add another instance of ‘local contrast’ but I use it for ‘my clarity trick’. I set it to ‘bilateral grid’ with a low contrast (4 as starting point) and then crank up the ‘detail’ slider till it’s overdone a bit. Turn on parametric-mask to select the highlights instead of shadows, so the effect is only active on the sky. Add a bit of mask feathering + blurring to prevent weird edges.
- Then lower the opacity of the whole ‘clarity local contrast’ module so that it just gives enough ‘push’ to the sun streaks, so they become more visible.
This sounds like a lot of steps, but don’t forget a lot of that comes as default in the modern workflow settings. I basically raised exposure, set filmic to high latitude and adjusted white-point to taste, tweaked saturation to taste and the image is basically there. The rest is ‘fixing up’ and ‘some sweetening on top’.