Bright Sky and hazy Castle

Hello everyone,

here’s a picture from my Scotland Trip from last September. I took a HDR of this scene to get the dark forest shadows and bright sky as best as possible but I fail to remove the brightness/hazy look of the buildings/trees. Not sure how to proceed best.

Alpha_6700_20250909_1727-3-10_hdr.dng (64.3 MB)
Alpha_6700_20250909_1727-3-10_hdr.dng.xmp (19.0 KB)

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

This is the first time I’m posting in play_raw and I hope I did everything correctly. The JPG size for thumbnail needs to be reduced but the raw file is not a problem, is it?

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The RAW is not a problem, of course, as there is no way of compressing them well enough. One would need to use some external storage each time. The large JPEGs are (to my knowledge) a problem for people on mobile data, where such pictures eat up data plans, and also because these large JPEGs in each PlayRaw would end up being several times of the topic’s RAW file.

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A first quick render:


Alpha_6700_20250909_1727-3-10_hdr.dng.xmp (17,4 KB)
edit: i tuned it a bit:

Alpha_6700_20250909_1727-3-10_hdr.dng.xmp (17,8 KB)

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This one is quite difficult for me, as it is strongly backlit.


Alpha_6700_20250909_1727-3-10_hdr.dng.xmp (10.8 KB)

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It is really hard to make this artifact free and not look hdri like. May try to improve on it.
Alpha_6700_20250909_1727-3-10_hdr.dng.xmp (45.7 KB)

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Tried this with GHS, but I need to play more using this method. Although the sky looked better than the attached edit with “traditional” tools, I prefer the latter.


Alpha_6700_20250909_1727-3-10_hdr_RT-1.jpg.out.pp3 (20.0 KB)

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