I had always assumed that corona photos like this are heavily processed in order to maximize the effect and that seeing one in real life would be more like "Eh, there's a sort of little ring thing in the sky."

Nope. During totality, the whole sky goes dark and you look up and there's a fucking ring of fire in the sky.

It looks exactly like these photos, just sitting there up in the sky. It feels like you got teleported to another solar system onto the surface of an alien planet.