The first image from two days ago, pointed straight towards the altar, had been taken at f8, ISO 200 and 2.5 s. I had needed different color corrections in different sections of the image. The contrast between the light through the plain windows behind the altar, and the back of the church, lit from one side through this blue and golden window, couldn’t have been more brutal.
DXO DeepPRIME XD had saved the shadows in the first image. The image of today would have been impossible without DXO.
The original was mostly black, except the window and a few streaks of color, where the light is reflected on the benches. It was a single exposure. Normally I would have taken a bracketed series of five images, but here I failed to do so, probably because to my eyes the contrast was strong but not extreme.
I’ve tried Lightroom, and the result was really poor. I tried an earlier version of DxO DeepPrime, and it was better, but still unsatisfying. This one is nice. I think, this is the best you can get without an HDR output device - and I’ve already talked about the problems of that.