Bringing Out the Sunbeams

I don't often show unedited photos, but this post is about editing, so I'm forced to make an exception to my rule.

A couple of years ago I took a photo of a beautiful sky full of clouds with a few sunbeams bursting through. I was really disappointed with the result. My camera tried its best to expose the scene correctly but there was simply too much contrast for it to see what I had seen.

The unedited original

Back then I tried to edit the scene to enhance those sunbeams, but in the process the landscape turned to a silhouette.

I like a good silhouette, but I wasn't particularly happy with this one.

I gave up after that because I didn't know how to fix it.

Last night I decided to have another go at editing that photo.

With the help of some recently acquired Photoshop plug-ins, I was amazed at the detail I was able to recover.

I still wasn't totally happy though. I'd now created something that was much brighter than what I'd seen that day. So this morning it was back to Photoshop to try again.

I think that's about as close as I'm going to get to reality.

Finally I decided to see what it looked like in black and white.

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Linking up to Skywatch Friday.