Here’s a photo from the Chinese Garden in Bochum. The contrasts are pretty intense, but I can handle them in darktable. That said, the picture looks pretty creepy afterward. I’m sure you can do a better job than I can…
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
2306_BotanischerGarten_0057.NEF (27,8 MB)
Sorry, with this dynamic range and a massively underexposed foreground, there is not much that can be done. Nevertheless, I tried my best.
Thanks, Thomas,
I know the shadows can’t be salvaged, so I edited them to make them look right. Here’s my latest attempt.
It looked terribly underexposed when I opened it, But I looked at the camera settings and struggled to understand why this was the case.
I didn’t find it as difficult to recover the foreground as I expected. I shared the heavy lifting for shadows between Tone Equalizer, Color Balance RGB and the old school shadow and highlights. I was please with the result considering the starting point.
2306_BotanischerGarten_0057.NEF.xmp (13.6 KB)
An interesting challenge!
I created two exposures in Filmulator - 0 and +5 EV. Blended with Enfuse. No doubt a lot of noise in the dark parts of the image, but rocks won’t show it!
Edit: more crunchy and bright
I worked hard to not go totally wonky with the shadows.
With ART 1.26.6
I decided to cut some rock, because it seemed too invasive, but I use ART. Greetings. Roberto
nice challenge to tame the dynamic range. Here my result out of RT 5.13 rc:
Here was my quick take. I was pretty surprised at how clean things stayed even when pushing exposure up 4+ EV.
Did some contrast management with exposure, tone equalizer and local contrast. Bit of sharpening. Less blue shadow. No tone mapper used.
From here it would be easy to adjust colors to your liking…
Something a little more stylized:
I originally was going to do a B&W, but had trouble creating something I liked.
This looks very natural, I like it.
I can do better with the trees than my second attempt:
(An aside: Discourse based sites are broken on my PC on Firefox atm. Pages don’t load or change and I have to press refresh a lot to get anywhere)
Quite interesting, that your image emphasizes the wet character of the stones!
I have to check, whether I got rid of it or just not emphasized it…
My interpretation:
Does it? Then I have probably made a mistake. 
I think one difference is, that the stones on my edit are a bit darker and not that warm regarding colour. Shadows usually have a cooler colour temperature.
All in all this is a very nice edit. I don’t see any real problem regarding the colour of the trees. The sky is nice and natural and you have achieved to avoid halos. The only thing which I find a bit distracting are the dark edges of the upper stones.
