So this one got some more than just the usual 'adjust contrast, desaturate, increase vibrance' treatment. After seeing what someone made of my fog post with some local contrast etc, I thought I'd experiment a bit. So I first did some work on the overall picture, toning down highlights, increasing ambiance, desaturating and setting the white balance a bit further to the cold side.
But then I added some extra darkening to the shadows of the road to increase its local contrast and lit up the shadowy regions of the mountains. Somehow that makes the image work a lot better now imho.
Already through most of the tips in this list,
The x-rite color checker is something I've ever heard of before though, I'll give it a shot, thanks!
It is bonkers to me that it's this difficult
Hmm, I read a thread on darktable about it. The devs said the problem with that kind of Pixel-based correction is that it's running counter to all their data processing and they'd basically have to rewrite their raw processor from scratch. I totally get it that that's a lot to ask from an open source team, so no complaints there.
I just tested it out with an Apple RawMax file, and did not have a problem 🤔