The shadows on the bird are not consistent with the shadows in the photo. In the bird the light comes from the right side and in the photo it comes from the left.
Flip the bird horizontally
In Photoshop Camera Raw you can push the exposure 2 stops without losing detail in the highlights; so 2 stop over-exposure would result in much more information in the shadows. Nice composition!
In my eyes this edit by Alan is the clear winner. Manuel edit using Capture One is as good but shadows were lifted a little less, which maybe better to my taste. Hard to say. Anyway, praise to Capture One!
It read a bit like it, but I'm sure that you didn't mean it this way. LibRaw is a software library. I'm sure software designed for raw conversion based on LibRaw would not make such a mess of an XTrans sensor - but RawDigger is not designed for that purpose. I just commented because some Fujifilm users might get the wrong idea that they should dodge LibRaw based software.
As xpat said, there's many methods in RawDigger to select , but he did not select any special demosaicing method. That grid looks like demosaicing in RT with Demosaicing method "none".
Yes, they seem. But these are quite different from your earlier edits with that very disturbing grid and wrong colours. Now they look much better in colours, but w/o lifted shadows.😎
There might have been finger-trouble in my first output from RawDigger. See my last post above where RawDigger did much gooder than before with that same raw file.
Not photoshop, but Corel PSP HDR merge from Silkypix exported 16bit TIFF images (-1EV - +5EV). No adjustments in Silkypix (it needs to remove some noise in shadows, but this was not the goal).
In a Fujifim camera there's probably a picture mode that does it, it's just finding out which it is and then discovering how to expose for that particular mode so that it comes out how you wanted it. Generally it's easier to work in raw, expose to maximise information and process to get the image as you want.
In x100v are at least three settings for high DR scenes - DR, DR priority (both affect single shot) and HDR (takes three images and combines them). I haven't tried those yet.
Here is my version that took around 10 minutes.
Basic mask made the old fashioned way that folks did in adobe CS2 and such like I imagine.
I did a bit more than that but it was no more really than 10 minutes fun quiz in photoshop.