Photo friendos, DXO software is on sale. I'm quite partial to DXO Photolab, mainly because DXO is the current owner of Nik software's control point technology.
Old school Nikon DSLR heads my remember versions of Capture NX where you could drop pins certain parts of the photo to select areas of similar color and tonal value, with selectable areas of effect and smart feathering. This meant that you could easily and effectively target parts of the image with local specificity not possible in a simple curves adjustment, without having to do any manual masking.
That tech was made by a company called Nik (no relation) and licensed to Nikon, but later that license passed into the hands of Google, for some reason, who baked control points into their Snapseed mobile app -- which I still like a lot, as well -- and then from google to DXO.
Anyway, Photolab has that control point UI, as do several other DXO/Nik products. Photolab is a standalone photo processing/raw development app that is a (partial) Lightroom replacement; they also have other tools that are designed to integrate with Lightroom/Photoshop.
