St. Monan’s used to be a centre for collecting sea salt, a windmill was used to pump the seawater up to boilers. I had hope to get some pictures, but the light was so harsh that all I got was highlights and shadows, no midtones whatsoever.
This is my best effort, any attempts to improve it are welcome.
_CTW4052.NEF (51.5 MB)
_CTW4052.NEF.xmp (12.8 KB)
These files are licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
_CTW4052_01.NEF.xmp (31,3 KB)
The recovery of the sky has me beat
_CTW4052.NEF.xmp (17.6 KB)
The lighting definitely makes it tricky!
I created four exposures in Filmulator (-1 to +2EV), blended with Enfuse.
Into GIMP. Used luminosity masks to add back contrast in the mid-range.
Added saturation to sky, water and parts of the rocks.
yes, difficult to tame the lights and shadows. Here my version in RT-dev:
Another attempt. By way of an experiment I created three tiff, -1, +2, and +3 EV. I pre-treated these in GIMP before blending them with Enfuse. The result is not significantly better than my previous try, but I must experiment further in this direction.
I must go back when it isn’t quite so sunny. Better for taking photographs, but not necessarily to my wife’s liking 
It is quite difficult (to me!) to achieve nice contrast in foreground and sky at the same time
_CTW4052.NEF.xmp (21.0 KB)
In my pictures of the St. Monan breakwater, I had used a 3-stop soft grad. Unfortunately, I decided not to take my bag on our walk, so no filters.
I will know, next time.
Hi @epeeist , I did not mean It is not well executed. I like It so much, indeed.
A bit challenging fot me, though
I like the idea, but it definitely needs a different technique, or different weather.
A lot challenging for me, hence posting it as a raw play.
TBH, as I said, a good idea, but a crap picture,
This is a really good one for practice because the dynamic range is so challenging.
I have a done a version with tons of detail in the shadows and highlights, but it was looking unnatural, so I embraced the blooming highlights a bit with this Filmic RGB version:
I’m going to play around with this one a bit more…
And a Sigmoid version with lots of contrast work done in Color Balance RGB:
_CTW4052.NEF.xmp (12.3 KB)
And for completeness, a version using AgX from the latest build from Kofa. This one I find a little too crispy, but I wanted to try out some different techniques. I used the contrast slider in Color Balance RGB and set different fulcrums for the highlights and shadows.
_CTW4052.NEF.xmp (15.7 KB)
