Take the following two pictures:

Unprocessed Image

Processed

The thing that should jump out at you in the “before” picture is that the clouds have virtually no definition and the sky is washed out.  They are drastically overexposed due to the dark foreground.  Now, some of this may be due to the altitude – I was about 8,000 feet above sea level, something I’m not too used to.  So my mental focus wasn’t that sharp, and I didn’t review the histogram on-site for blown-out highlights. Click to continue »