Rather than spend all day talking about Diaspora on Diaspora:

I’ve been testing Raw Converter Pro (available in the Mac App store). While it has serious flaws (e.g. no way to save settings per photo - i.e. not Pro at all), the tone balancing option produces a remarkably film like result. The sample below has the original, RAW on the left and the Tone Balanced version on the right. I little bit of sharpening was applied to both in equal amounts.

Note: this isn’t HDR software and only one RAW file was used in the processing.