Clipped highlights, but only in Photolab?

The problem can be summarized as ‘premature data clipping in raw channels’.

In this particular example, OP provided us with two RAWs, taken seconds away, with the same settings and very similar lighting, for which one rendering was ok, the other being horrible (both taken with non-cpu lens). See Clipped highlights, but only in Photolab? - #44 by noname for preliminary analysis. Somewhat similar topic was in Weird tint to highlights , where data was clipped at 23k for ‘DNG export with NR and optical corrections only’, like in PureRAW, while it floated freely up to 51k for ‘DNG all corrections applied’ export. In that case a fully supported camera/lens combination was used (but ‘highly efficient compression’ was set, which is not the OP case, where standard 14-bit loseless was chosen). Both cases may have a common root cause, but that’s for DxO to investigate.

If you download both good and bad OP RAWs, you’ll easily see the problem. To magnify it, just choose Smart Lighting->Spot Weighted and mark some face area. You’ll see that whatever camera rendering you choose, the problem remains (for some reason a bit less seen for Leica Q).