it is for a DNG generating software ( and its developer ) to set WhiteLevel as they wish for a purpose … if tag with an explicit value is missed ( not set ) then by default it is assumed to be 2^BitsPerSample - 1 . … in the raw DNG file you see the value for WhiteLevel tag was set by Adobe DNG converter, by people who (unlike people in DxO) know a thing or two about what to set in DNG files… no ? Adobe knows what the real white level was in incoming .ARW file and upon conversion to non-linear DNG correctly put it there as it should be for other software to use it in DNG file … for the purpose of verification in another thread I demonstrated that DxO will deal with original incoming raw and incoming DNG from Adobe DNG converter in absolutely exact manner ( for the purpose of Tiff and 2 flavors of DNG outputs = https://forum.dxo.com/t/clipped-highlights-but-only-in-photolab/37138/133
and yes the substance of the bugs in DxO PL code is
(A) wrong ( GROSSLY wrong) calculation of white level in incoming raws for some camera models ( like Nikon Zf in another topic )
(B) clipping below white level ( that DxO finds - correctly or not - another question ) in incoming raws ( yes if you specifically move white level far away from any image data - like you did DxO will not clip, but it clips unclipped data that sits just below it, like 1/2-1/3 stops below ) … in another topic about Nikon Zf camera where the bug “A” was discovered it was shown the same that injecting a sufficient number of pixels set to a certain DN will trick DxO into not clipping by forcing it to calculate white point sufficiently far away from actual data = https://forum.dxo.com/t/clipped-highlights-but-only-in-photolab/37138/ … no raw converter shall destroy image data upon ingestion of raw file in itself for a user to work with it if that data is present in raw file and lies below clipping point ( = not clipped ), but DxO does exactly that … we are not talking about data that lies 0.01 stops below clipping point - we can forgive such small beans… we are talking about whopping 1/3 stop or so… nowdays sensor designers will kill to get DR increased by such amount
(C) magenta tint effect resulting from incorrect ( incorrect in relation to what DxO writed as white point in output DNG ) demosaicked data scaling by DxO ( and that is with already destroyed data if that original data was close to the whitelevel calculated by DxO ) vs white point written in DxO generated linear DNG files