I took this shot in February 2023 at Destination Point, an overlook above the Snake River south of Kuna, Idaho.
I wanted to catch the scene with the other photographer on the outer overlook but wanted to enhance the light shining on the rock face below, bring up the light reflection on the river, and enhance the sunset glow if possible.
You may only download this file to demonstrate how you would process the image. The file is Copyright of the photographer, and you must delete the raw file when you are done. Please post a jpg of what you created, explain what you did, and why you did it.
My attempt is to bring back some of the shadow detail and add color to the sky and reflect it in the river. I started with a raw conversion with no sharpening and this curve
Triple processed the photo (opened as smart object) on different layers, first to almost fully blend the sky with bit lower EV and then finally even more darkened sky with mask to let something through (mainly to add even bit more blues)
Boldy added yellow and orange color layers to add more the beautiful sunset glow. and haze. And also big yellow round gradient in pin light mode to get rid of the clipped sky area where the sun roughyl is, selectively masked some of it out to keep it looking like it’s still behind the hill.
Finally decided to crop it to 16:9 and reduce the sky area as there’s not much going on, and added some vignetting on right and bottom where the image is naturally darker.
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