Hi SpeedSkater,
Thanks for this post, interesting, now that I've done a few tests.
First some comments about the image - I can see why you wanted to capture the scene, lovely place and a nice composition  
The scene does have a wide dynamic range made more difficult by the foreground being in shadow, from clouds I assume.
Significant areas of the clouds are blown in the highlights and unrecoverable in any program.
The darker areas of cloud look unnaturally dark in the pwp file, does that represent the scene or not? The most noticeable difference with a Qimage conversion is the contrast in the sky & clouds, in fact the transition between light & darker area in some areas is very much a step transition win the pwp file.
The horizon at  the left side of the image has a halo and the colour blue sky looks like it has been affected. I've seen that halo effect before in ACR when a high level of recovery is used.

I processed the NEF in Qimage with a fill level of about 15 or 16. By using a curve filter with the raw image, I managed to get a little more contrast in the bright areas and kept the foreground contrast similar (maybe a little better) to the pwp file.
I also got a friend to use ACR with it, that too did a good job of the sky but did not make it quite so dark in places. The foreground was not good, it lacked contrast and looked a little washed out.

If I had been at the scene, I would have bracketed exposures and probably chosen a lower exposure to maintain more of the highlight detail and then used the Qimage's excellent raw Fill to bring up the dark areas.
I do agree that, with the image as it is, there are possibilities of improving the highlight recovery, I've suspected before that there is a little more scope with that aspect of Qimage conversion.
I know Mike has in the past used customers examples to make improvements so maybe he'll have a look too  
Terry.

I my view it's the best there is. A lower exposure on tha  image would have done the trick I think.
That PWP program seems very slow to process images and a little clumsy to use. 
Terry

I rarely use qimage for raw processing, but in scr it is easy enough to recover the detail in the clouds by reducing the exposure, and increase the fill light to compensate for the blacks. a short fiddle with the contrast and other settings will get it near enough. The pwp jpeg has been sharpened and some other messing about has taken place, imho, and it is easy to get far better results than that. In general raw converters handle files differently, most do a reasonable job with a good image, but sometimes it is necessary to push things around a bit more, where something like bibble or similar are more suited.

Best wishes,

Ray

Well yes that is the case and I've proved it. I downloaded PWP Pro trial and tried all sorts of settings but cannot get the image looking anything like that shown on the link in the1st post. With the clouds dark as possible, lots of shadow fill etc., the foreground is dull and lacks contrast. I think the image shown was tone mapped after conversion, someone has been telling porky pies 
Terry

Hi Fred and Terry et al,

It was late last night - or rather early morning - scr was a typo - should be acr - adobe camera raw. The image is merely a screen capture of my acr processed nef file beside their pwp jpeg (both opened at same time in ps tiled view, then screen captured/cropped to remove the tool bars, etc. - not a quality processing work flow  ). Using acr it was trivial to recover the highlight detail - the original raw file does not have blown highlights in the clouds, since they can be recovered quite easily. That is one of the advantages of raw files, of course. I've no idea of how they processed the pwp jpeg, however, I think my simple acr processing gives a better result for me - but this is purely a personal opinion. Now, whether I want the sky dark and ominous, or all bright and cheerful, that can be done too, in Qimage also, I'm certain, but there is little point in taking a perfectly usable raw image, and manipulating it to duplicate what I feel is the poor result they get in the pwp jpeg version. So, leaving aside the colours, sharpening, and other post processing, can you recover the cloud _detail_ in qimage? I do not use qimage for raw, so haven't a clue how to do that. When I tried, it stated something like the highlights were blown, adjust exposure, or whatever. However in acr, with warnings turned on, it does not indicate the highlights being blown, unless I adjust the exposure to make it so.

I merely put the two images side by side to show the cloud detail. It is not an excuse, but resizing and adjusting jpegs to get down to 128k does not give the same result as looking at the original. In my opinion, my acr effort was better than their pwp effort, but I'm quite happy for others to think differently. If you think about it, if you recover? blown highlights, the overall tone will tend to darken, unless you somehow lighten the other end, which then reduces contrast - (well, I almost understand what I'm saying here).

If it was worth the effort, then I would process the sky separately to the rest of the image, maybe even consider faking two exposure settings and doing an hdr. If you examine the exif info for the raw, then I think the auto exposure choice could be better for that image, but this has little to do with the op's original question, which was concerned with highlight recovery in Qimage. I merely posted originally because some had said it was not possible in acr, I'm no expert, but I found it easy enough - and acr is nowhere near as good as the more specialised raw processors.

Best wishes,

Ray

Don't mean to butt in on this thread, but probably the best (from a quality standpoint) raw processor for NEF files is Capture NX2. It also has the ability to do local changes on the picture as well as global so in this case you could change the exposure or brightness, contrast, hue, saturation or anything else on the sky or the foreground seperately. they use control points and selection points to easily pick different areas of the pictures.

Mike

Mike,
No problem at all 
That Nikon program sounds very clever. Trouble is with all those possibilities it could be time consuming as I found with other raw programs with lots of controls. - expensive too!
The beauty of Qimage is it's low cost and simplicity with a limited fiddle factor, and certainly a program to encourage the use of shooting in raw.

Ray,
I would not agree on that with Canon but it is some while since I used it and they may have improved by now.
Not quite but with the use of a curve filter I got closer. I got my friend to have another go in acr and he reproduced your version, more-or-less. The problem was that seemed unatuarally dark overall and the foreground was dark too. Any more fill just washed it out. That's where Qimage wins, on Fill . http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/quality/raw.htm
When you know that you expose accordingly.
No doubt Qimage raw could be improved but I would hate the simplicity to be degraded too much.
Terry