This one was taken in the late afternoon near Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife. I liked how the haze was lit from behind by the setting sun. As always, reality looked much more impressive than the photo!
Here ist the quite boring jpeg from the camera (downscaled)
Some more tweaking. I enabled CA correction, but decided to disable distortion correction. Imho distortion correction doesn’t do this picture any favors, to the contrary.
Then I slightly raised the WB temp to 5500 K, adjusting for the warmer light of this late afternoon / golden hour scene. Also added a very slight vignette.
Great capture btw, @Sunhillow - definitely the type of rare occasion shot that deserves to be carefully edited and preserved, not just an exercise in post-mitigating difficult lighting conditions.
Gave it a try in dt 5.0.
Mostly tried to minimize the bright sun exposure and muted most of the image…a slight crop and some tone, contrast and color eq adjustments. DSCF2690.RAF.xmp (17.1 KB)
Thanks to all!
After viewing the edits I decided to change mine a bit … as @Ogven proposed, distortion correction is not necessary here. And I like your 16:9 crop, so I chose 16:10.
Bad thing is that the sun is too blown to rescue it.
I don’t understand why so many people care about HDR / highlight-shadow recovery so much. When highlights are blown, it’s usually because there was no other way to get reasonable exposure and the light was simply part of the scene.
I never worry about blown highlights or drowned shadows unless it is possible to redo the capture with better light, because otherwise the alternative is simply to not have that picture.
I’d go even further than that: in large-contrast scenes like this one, I find that the only way I ever get a pleasant realistic look is never going too HDR and accepting blown highlights and drowned shadows as part of the scene, or even increasing (“worsening”) them in post e.g. by adjusting global exposure or contrast levels.
The only real alternative would be exposure bracketing, but handheld that would require a suitably slow scene, a steady hand and a camera capable of very fast continuous shooting. Short of that, I for one embrace blown highlights and/or drowned shadows wherever the alternative is not having the shot.
Let’s blow the highlights. I think it makes sense to keep the contrast on the buildings that are very interesting with the haze. Indeed, without local tone mappings we are giving away parts of the image. Halation helps visually retaining some information, showing where the clipped highlights are the hottest.
Preliminary edit with darktable, then processed with a custom film sim. DSCF2690.RAF.xmp (7.4 KB)