How do I processing RAW images in the same way my camera processes JPEGs?

stephband wrote:

Thank you for doing this. I like the SilkyPix import, it has the closest colouring to how I remember the scene on Saturday. (I like how you edited the last one too - I have multiple exposures I was going to stack to create something like this).

Overall, the conclusion to this thread seems to be, "buy more tools", which I'm slightly surprised about, because until today I thought they were all doing much the same thing, and assumed MacOS processes to be among the best.

SilkyPix explicitly supports my camera, but seems to have multiple websites which is a bit confusing. ON1 on the face of it looks like it might be a richer tool for composing HDR stacks, and it appears to support Photoshop plugins (Panasonic has a plug-in for importing HLG images, another thing I wanted to play with). But it's hard to tell. Time to download and try them out!

Thanks for your help!

Neat image!

I just had to mess with it... all raw channels are blown at some place. Here's a screenshot of the brightest part, without correction:

Note the brightest part of the lava renders magenta, that's because the white balance took all three pileups of blown channel values and skewed them according to the camera-supplied WB multiplers 2.211, 1.000, 1.629.  Turn on the highlight reconstruction tool and it paints those pixels with appropriate color:

So yes, processing a raw file to approximate the JPEG render takes a bit of work.  Most raw processing software (camera firmware included) will default to something acceptable, which may be acceptable to you, until it's not.  Then, the world of the raw file opens to you, with myriad choices, especially with an image such as this.  You're seeing that in some of the renders posted here; me, I didn't know there were people in the frame until that one render... 

About stacking, if you don't want to invest a lot of money to start, there are a couple of free alternatives.  LuminanceHDR comes to mind, not exactly the easiest UI but the the merging algorithms are pretty good.  What little I've done has been with HDRMerge, a command line program that (for me, anyway) is a bit more straightforward to use and will provide a nice linear amalgam render to which you will then need to apply a tone curve with other software.  "Free" comes at a price...