can't say i understand at all what all the retinex sliders do but it does do! only complaint is the haloing on highlights i guess? managed to mostly control them. maybe i should actually read documentation...

it's uh. it's uh. it's.... something
SOMETHING!
that first shot is at f8! others are f1.9. all the 1.9 shots metered at faster than 1/1000 despite being nearly completely dark lol.
the images are more usable than idve thought. sort of. i say sort of because all my software struggles to handle these absurd images.
rawtherapee and darktable both fail to display the image accurately while editing so theres a LOT of guesswork involved. and also the filesizes are absurd cuz all the noise. but if i try scaling down the image. well, it looks very different due to the noise being so prevalent that when the pixels get merged they have a big effect.
digikam doesnt even display an ISO value past 65k when browsing my collection lol.

edit: last image shows a pic at 1:1 zoom for an accurate view while editing. reaaaaal small bit of image to go off of on just 1080p x . x