At first I thought i had a cloud mishap with textures (i run rex + asca usually).. but i restored back the textures.. even compared to a clean install and i'm seeing the same thing.

 

Granted, this is just a test fsxmark07 flight, not a cockpit i typically use anyway (the crj 700 imported from fsx).

As you can see in the images i'm not seeing this with others like the lancair legacy.. 

 

Basically the clouds almost have too much punch or bloom or a combo of bloom and brightness.  My defaults under HDR have bloom at 1.0 and brightness 1.1  im also about to dive into the world of the pta tweaker, but i was just trying to get things baselined first.  This oversaturation of brightness doesnt occur with the external view.. i also dont see much change externally going from 1.0 to 0.9 bloom and 1.1 to 0.9 brightness, however as you can see, the cockpit at least with the crj did benefit.

 

So i'm asking.. which is more "realistic".. this might just be one single isolated (cockpit view) incident and i'm making too much out of it, but wanted to check around first..

 

EDIT: i tested with the PMDG 737-800 NGX and i'm seeing the same blown out look to certain clouds.  The airbus a320 by aerosoft doesnt have this effect (not blown out).

 

 

Here is the baseline too bright cockpit view (strangely, if you wait another 20 seconds, this blown out look almost seems to get worse somehow).

 

Now here it is with bloom/brightness 0.9

 

here is the external view (normal bloom):

 

Here is the legacy (normal settings) seems fine:

 

legacy with 0.9 bloom/bright

 

Thanks for any info.

im also about to dive into the world of the pta tweaker

In that case I would strongly recommend turning off luminance adaption under the HDR and Post Processing tab. This will stop the lighting from changing as you change the view, or the position of your view. It will mean taking the time to find values that work across conditions, but will pay dividends when you do. It may not be perfect, but its better that the wildly varying exposure values you get with it on, and you still get the benefit of using the brightness, bloom and saturation control within P3D's HDR settings.