Unnatural HDR is an oxymoron. Nature is naturally HDR.
Try the relight preset in the tone eq as a start see what that gives you and then modify
I may have a bug in my version as tone eq is not honoring my mask but you can see that if I masked the dark areas you would recover you palm in the shadows with the eq
Is the parametric mask working with the tone eq for you?? See above on my image …parametric mask was ingnored… rough drawn mask seems fine…
I don’t normally use a parametric mask with the tone eq, but it seems to work ok.
Thank you all for your answers!
The tone equalizer preset didn’t seem to be a good starting point for me, much too bright. But I played around with masking special areas as you did and used tone equalizer, local contrast in some instances and modified black point. Still not completely happy yet, but maybe on the right way…
Your WB is way off on this edit …try adjusting that and see where you are…
Ya I normally don’t either. I was just going to try it on the tree as there was such a HDR in the scene I wanted to show the OP how much they could reveal. Thanks for your feedback
@ExilPrinte
my Edit
@ExilPrinte Wanted to mention that your photo has a postcard feel to it. Makes me warm during these winter months.
You’re right, didn’t notice that while editing. Thanks for the hint.
Will also have a closer look at all the other versions, really curios to analyse the xmp-Files…
I forgot to add mine but you can always just use the jpg as a sidecar in lightable. It most often has the xmp metadata embedded. Try it with mine…Go to the history panel. Select load sidecar onto a duplicate of your raw file. In the dialogue box it will only show xmp but you can change to all files and then use the jpg file…it should behave as if you had loaded the xmp…