Meanwhile, I moved on to colors etc. Everything sorted out!
But, I have one simple question:
are CHDK DNGs pre-processed before saving? I did notice earlier that highlights are less blown in DNG than JPG and that was useful in almost all situations. But this confuses me, because with my Nikon DSLR it's usually RAW file which is blown and JPG has D-Lighting applied. On SD4000 it's vice versa. JPG is blown but DNG has better highlights. So I stumbled upon a sunset shot in which I actually WANTED blown highlights. But no matter which processing I applied to DNG in LR, I couldn't get the highlights to look like JPG, the color, the lightness. Not even using curves, nor brushing helped. Perhaps adjusting the yellow hue luminance helped a bit, but it's not the look I wanted.
Also, I've noticed that DNG has less aberrations, less fringing, and I believe in this case it's easily noticeable. That is also a bit counter-intuitive for me, since I'm used to fixing this stuff in DSLR RAWs. I attach two samples: IMG_0798-2 is OOC JPG crop, and IMG_0798-2-2 is the untouched DNG crop. In DNG, highlights appear dull and lifeless - in this particular scene I wouldn't want any DR correction, but I seem to be unable to turn it off...
SD4000 is 12bit so I'm sure there are no curves applied by CHDK. Also, i-Contrast is off and I bumped saturation and sharpness only in JPG. It doesn't affect highlights.
Is this normal behavior, or should I adjust something?