Those of us who dabble in cooking will often know what umami is. Its a one of the five basic tastes and will create that extra something to lift your dish above the ordinary. I will often add Worcestershire sauce as my popular umami ingrediant.
So I was wondering whats your umami touch in processing your photo. I know this will often change but currently for me its tweaking contrast equaliser in darktable by raising the coarse luma a touch followed by local contrast. Again a slight tweak to details.
I’m interested to see what others see as their favourite touch to a photo
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Seeing, when others are just looking. Being ready for the shot when it reveals itself. Capturing the mundane scenes, that only become memorable in retrospect. Capturing the verb, not the noun. Post-processing things quickly, instead of letting things be forgotten. Struggling, and learning from mistakes.
In other words, care.
I do think I’m a better cook than photographer, though.
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I guess umani for me, if I understand your question correctly, is using the local contrast module on most of my images. I just love the extra clarity and lift it gives to an image. Soft portraits may not get the local contrast treatment but most general images get a lift from the local contrast module in darktable.
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Lately, for highlights, I’ve been rolling off the exposure with the tone equalizer rather than letting the tone mapper (generally Sigmoid for me) roll off the saturation. Not sure that I will stick with this, but I’ve been liking it so far.
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Particularly on shots without deep focus, blurring the background, and masking local contrast adjustments to affect only the foreground. Gives a greater illusion of depth, and separation between foreground and background.
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Particularly on shots where the sky is prominent, using a second instance of color calibration in channel mixer mode placed last in the pipe, with blend mode set to multiply. Adjust fulcrum, opacity, and parametric mask sliders to taste. I often find this gives nicer colour and pop than using local contrast.
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Capturing: Motion blur. 1s transforms a busy location filled with tourists into a landscape of blurry ghosts, 1/4s just blurs people out a bit. A variable ND filter and a tripod are handy.
Editing: Darken the uninteresting areas, add local contast, keep colors subtle. If all else fails, make it high contrast B&W 
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Great solutions for messy mixed light sources. Can’t have issues with colours if there are none.
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Next time I am in Tokyo I must try this. Bloody tourist everywhere…hmmm…I guess that includes me.
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One thing: vignette
Two things: crop and vignette
Three things: selected highlights / shadows emphasis, crop and vignette
I guess I need to stop now…
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It works best if you can get a higher vantage point. Eg climb into something if permitted, try a cafe/restaurant which has an upper level, etc. If you take the shot at eye level, people may just blur the key part of the image. If nothing else works, I usually find a building, set the exposure and the focus, use a 2s timer, then reach up high and press the camera onto a wall, IBIS takes care of the rest.
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But you are behind the camera - that usually make a decisive difference 
! At least for your image.
But talking about umami: long exposure (or averaging of many shots) of 20s or longer can often make large portions of your image become completely obscured (like water and sky) which in return makes your static subject stand out even more - like the taste of Worcestershire sauce on my cherry pie 
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Mine is one that was pointed out to me on this forum by @Terry , I think.
I very often lower the Global Offset in the 4 Ways tab of Color Balance RGB in order to give more striking depth to shadows. I usually lower it by less than 1%, often as little as 0.25%. It just gives the images a little more “snap”.
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For me at present, it’s using RGB primaries to shift hues - it varies, but usually starts with the blue channel. 
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For insect stuff, masking the subject for sharpening and local contrast adjustments, and sometimes using an inverse mask to de-emphasize the background.
I also add a touch of blue into the shadows. My images tend to feel a bit warm even though I’m using a flash in (usually) indirect light. This just helps add some color contrast.
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I use color balance rgb, where I emphasize vignetting with the shadows and mid-tones, which makes the effect more subtle and creates interesting contrasts.
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I think there’s also a technique, where many images are taken, and the median or the most frequently seen value is used for each pixel - the assumption being that as people pass, the surface covering the scene always changes, while the scene (buildings etc) is stable.
Won’t work if the people are backlit, of course, because then the surface that covers the scene is mostly black (= always the same).
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Might be suitable for the Processing category.
My take is that I do not have a go-to per se. Certain tools are definitely more robust, but I would attempt multiple and see what makes the photo special (pop). I would go through the tools that I think might do that.
It is about being open to the possibilities; sometimes the go-to does nothing for the image. Selective/context-aware processing is another part of the equation. Over-seasoning with MSG can be a turn off for instance.
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Here is my secret -
I go through my standard workflow, exposure, tone eq., color cal, Sigmoid, Color RGB, and diffuse & sharpen.
Then I look at the image and decide what could be improved, and iterate. Then re-review and iterate again.
Then I decide that I’ve “dug the hole too deep,” so I make a new copy of the image and start over.
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I think my most consistent processing tactic is mostly imperceptible. But I do it every time, and I think it’s my most personal touch.
I will always sharpen and lightly bloom an image in the contrast eq, but then head directly to the diffuse and sharpen module to soften the hard contrast with the 1st and 2nd order, and then sharpen fine lines with the 3rd and 4th orders, then I’ll push the first 3 anistropy to the right, while pulling the 4th back to the left.
It is basically muscle memory at this point… Though I’m not sure how much it offers to the overall output.
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