Iāve done this :
quite the same as other people : tone EQ in two instances + Diffuse & Sharpen
1X1A5669.CR3.xmp (Ansel, 13.6 KB)
1X1A5669.CR3.xmp (Ansel, 13.6 KB)
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I need to update my libraw, rawproc read the image just fine but got almost none of the needed metadata: black subtract, as-shot white balance. I pulled them out of a exiftool dump and entered them manually. Did get color primaries, go figure.
Anyway, I used a movie-trick tone curve strategy: first apply a loggamma curve, then shape the data with a control point curve. Those are always interesting, so Iām posting the rawproc screenshot to show it:
Note the flat part in the interregnum between the shadow tones and highlight tones; those pixels are being severely mistreated, but there are so few of them and the effect is thusly minimalā¦
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This is one of my main struggles with post processing. The tools have become much better lately both in dt and RT (I mainly use the latter). My conclusion so far is that you canāt really push it very far despite the excellent tools. It ends up looking unnatural. Theoretically I guess you should be able to make a high contrast scene look like a low contrast one but in practice Iāve not succeeded in making it work consistently, Neither have I seen others do it well.
Recently Iāve accepted deeper shadows than I did before. Soon Iāll be blowing highlights instead.
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Youāll be limited by the amount of data in shadows and you will have to correct white/color balance too because of that.
Only increasing exposure + contrast isnāt enough.
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Depends on the image.
This particular one is a really good example of high dynamic range and varying color temperature. There are two very distinct regions of light energy, one lit by direct sunlight, one lit by indirect sky; the tone curve itself can pull up the lower region but there are two different white balances to consider. I just played with the white balance in my rawproc rendition; theyāre not that different, but what do you prefer, neutral top/blue bottom, or warm top/neutral bottom? Neither one really looks that bad, just what you want to put out thereā¦
Even un-natural has its place; witness real estate portfolios in the USā¦
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Ouch. 
Oh, Iām not above abstraction. I did this with GIMP some time ago, dug it up for a post elsewhere about departing reality:
I mean, what do you do with a noisy JPEG??
Destroy the structure with small radius blur, convert to monochrome, increase contrast, add grain. 
Edit: this also works with clean RAW files. 
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Hereās my take on it. DT 4.3 dev.
Edit minor tweakā¦ the women next the door had blue-ish skin which bothered me. So I used to Color Balance RGB to neutralize the shadows with the color picker (or at least thatās how I thought that worked) than another instance to warm up shadows slightly. That seems to have fixed it
1X1A5669.CR3.xmp (15.8 KB)
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Mine too ā¦ Win 7, FireFox, 99% sRGB LCD.
The second one looks greenish for me. I am using Firefox. I download the xmp that I thought was for the first one, but when I opened it, it appears to be for the second one, as it is greenish.
At the same time, many others looks more greenish here than when I open them in dt. I have been wondering if it is Firefox.
Green on my phone was well although thatās in Firefox mobile. But I have no reason to suspect itās the browser.
I have been re-reading this thread. How does an old-fashioned contrast mask compare with the various methods which have been suggested?
This was done in GIMP, but using the .jpeg at the start of this thread as I was unable to convert the raw effectively using Filmulator.
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If we are talking about that edit of mine ā¦for sure I think it is although I have a bit of color blindnessā¦ I was likely doing it late at night. I was fiddling around trying to tweak the shadows I thinkā¦so it all comes from or most of it from that final step using CBā¦
Easy to see the āvolumeā in green and yellow here if you use the right tools to check which I didnāt really clearly
Just turning that off pulls that backā¦not sure to the right place either but I guess I could go backā¦ I was sort of going for that diffuse shadow that you sometimes see where the shadows arenāt so dark and you can see somethingā¦ This might be a case where the more authentic capture is a very dark shadow but then does that make an interesting photoā¦ I guess that is where intention personal taste takes over 
Turning it off ā¦
Hereās my version. I use local contrast, NO filmic or sigmoid.
Tone Eq on shadows and highlights strong and I adjusted them up a little.
I have a color rgb preset that pushes vibrant color 10% but I have pushed all the presets under perceptual brilliance grading into the 20%.
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The overall balance is pretty good but thereās a fairly severe halo on the edge of the shadow. See @kofa 's post upthread.
I understand that there are various options for color management in FireFox but I canāt advise how to view or adjust them. Others here probably know ā¦
