Southwest_Visuals

Wow, thanks for the huuuge answer! I'm kinda used to editing in photoshop and Lightroom, but never touch things as profiles and stuff. But I could follow your argumentation and I agree with you! 
At the moment I can't grasp whether the develop persona is meant to regulate the picture editing wise or in my personal style. So I don't know whether I should tweak the image so I can edit it afterwards (like making the image look "flat") or already go into the direction I want to head later.
But I tried the live-filters! They work definitely better than the other filters!
Thanks for the help guys! 
 
Cheers
Max

Thanks...start to finish about 5 mins, that includes a rough & ready paint job on the mask. I tried to do a macro for you, just leaving the mask painting to do...but the macro doesn't allow saving from the tone mapping persona, hopefully this will be improved soon.
As much as I love working in Affinity Photo I do not like the develop persona as it is. I only use it as a method for opening my raw files, I work in 32 bit from raw, these tend to open darker than I like, I just increase the exposure a bit, occasionally I alter the white balance...however this will depend on the image. If my highlights are blowing then I might pull them down but only enough to control the blown out parts. I then select the colour profile either ProPhoto or ROMM. Then hit develop. I can now get serious about editing, using a combination of adjustment layers that I can go back and alter if needed.
I would really like the team to make improvements to the develop persona, the shadows & highlights adjustments could do with a user adjustable range control, currently they seem to be operating too far into the mids, this leaves a flat appearance (however they are a lot better than they were), blackpoint & contrast cause tone clipping a bit too quickly. The settings that have been used also need to be fixed at the point the develop button is clicked, the image can then be returned to from the photo persona, users can pick up exactly where they left off.
Presets could also do with a bit of attention, at the moment the basic panel needs to keep all of the settings, it keeps some, white balance needs the tick applying and profiles are completely ignored. There is also a need for all settings in all tabs to be saved as a master preset, this will then enable users to use the exact settings for multiple files, this can sort of be achieved at the moment but they have to be done in each tab...which is a bit of a pain, especially if one tab gets forgotten.
These improvements would go a long way to enabling users to do more work in the develop persona, meaning less adjustment layers needed in the photo persona...this will help keep file sizes down 
These suggestions have been made before in various posts and I am sure the Devs are aware, however it doesn't hurt to give a gentle reminder now and again, particularly in the beta thread where things are being worked on 

Just an update to for @Murfee & @Southwest_Visuals
Tried live filters and they are so much better, at least for shadow and highlight adjustments.  They don't go to the extreme at all and are nowhere near as sensitive as the adjustment layers.  I don't understand why there is a shadow/highlight adjustment layer and live filter. Very confusing for a newbie.
Anyways, thank you very much @Murfee for helping with this query, and to @Dazzleralso, thank you!

Thanks for the effort Murfee!
I really need to try this out! Looks better than my edit for sure!
Yeah that's what I am experiencing too. Maybe they will fix the "dead slider space" in order to free more room to play instead of crushing those blacks at 20%
Thanks for the help guys!
Maybe someone else has a pro tip for us!
Cheers
 

Hi,
I did the same as fde101 except for the clarity, I didn't use it, I duplicated the image and took it into the tone mapping persona, I added some local contrast. If needed you could adjust the opacity of this layer or use the average blend mode. You could also just add a mask to keep the crispness focussed on the car.

You can also add to the moodiness by adding a live vignette & changing the blend range to darks. 

Hi @//iain & @Southwest_Visuals 
I do very little processing in the develop persona, I prefer to do all of my adjustments in the photo persona, this is because I like to be able to go back and alter things, currently this is not possible in the develop persona once you have clicked develop. You can go back in but all of your sliders will have reset. Hopefully the team will make improvements here as it has been requested quite a lot by users. 
You could try the Live Filter in the photo persona for shadows/highlights, there is more control in this as you can also set the ranges that you want affected. 
I shoot with Nikon and have no experience using Sony, hopefully someone else can give their methods to get the best out of the files.