These are my definitive xmls for NGCam 2.0 and trCamera_Xmas_Release; everything is working OK and smoothly and auxiliary lenses are almost perfect now, as they were the most difficult to achieve a good level of quality and denoise (for me, the premade noise models are horrible).
Tried these, and found the colors were sligthly too saturated in the blues (the sky was significantly bluer than it is. Nothing big mind you, just a wee bit).
On personal level we don't object that someone may prefer sth to sth.
Where does this royal "we" come from now?
one needs to look for some objective criteria ..... In night photography we want object to stand out without loosing "night atmosphere".
Wanting the subject to stand out from a dark background is a pure subjective criteria. There is no such thing as an objective "atmosphere". Plus as soon as you start increasing luminosity by technical artifacts, and doing selectively so, your are deep in the realm of personal preference.
Note that the initial post was about using astrophotography on landscape, resulting in an almost day feeling. This I find
1/ Useful for artistic (purely personal) and technical (think industry photography at night to show progress/damage with no esthetic purpose) purposes,
2/ Coherent from a technical POV. increasing received light applies ot the whole picture. ***for astro*** I think this solution give more interpretive room for photograpghs, while keeping night sight with a more subject selective light enhancement (which is what you advocate for apparently).
3/ An argument for keeping darks lighter is that it is easier to post-process the image back to darker than to post-process it to lighter (easier to reduce information than increase it). Not that I care about it myself, but just to show there are several valid ways to address the problem.