Here is the before shot:
That is on the North Cornwall coast in South West England. The challenge was a generally overcast day with a patch of bright sunlight in the distance. As you can see, I chose to expose for the sky in this shot (and did a companion where I exposed for the foreground).
Here is the after version:
I have made two major changes:
1. I recently discovered a very easy way of bringing out detail in dark areas without destroying lighter sections of a picture. Create a duplicate layer, desaturate the colours, invert the image to a white and black "negative" and then set the layer to "overlay" mode. The darker the original pixel, the lighter its counterpart in the new layer and thus the more it is affected. At this stage, I also did a little bit of colour balance work to make the result slightly warmer.
2. Cropping the image. On the original, you'll notice a blob about half way up, near the left hand edge. This was a tiny splash of water I had picked up while nearer the sea, which I didn't notice until looking at the photos on the computer. It was more noticeable on the lightened version so I have cropped the image down to exclude it. I also wanted to put it in a 16:9 widescreen ratio for cinematic effect and found that I could do that while keeping all the points of interest. I first determined my maximum width (to avoid the blob) then divided by 16 and multiplied by 9 to determine the appropriate height to match; that gave me a crop window that I could then move around until I had framed the image the way I wanted.
Overall, I think the final result is successful and certainly a much improved image over the original.
Wulf