Malvives

Antonio Correia

My daughter was in Maldives when she shot this picture. It is in CR2. I Photoshoped it to TIFF and then to JPG.
The sand is lost because it is too white. The sky is frightening but it was the reallity I presume...
What I am supposed to do for a better looking ? It is not bed now... Is it ? :
Thank you

edgework

Antonio Correia wrote:

My daughter was in Maldives when she shot this picture. It is in CR2. I Photoshoped it to TIFF and then to JPG.
The sand is lost because it is too white. The sky is frightening but it was the reallity I presume...
What I am supposed to do for a better looking ? It is not bed now... Is it ? :
Thank you

Your blue channel has some detail in the sand. I copied it to a new layer, in luminosity mode, then applied a curve to jack up the detail. I used the blending sliders to eliminate all but the lightest areas from the underlying image (the sand) and used a quick mask with a large soft brush to get rid of any tones in the water or clouds.

It's fortunate that there are three specific areas that vary enough in value that they can be reasonably isolated with blending sliders and masks. The water took a contrast curve, and a color enhancement in lab. Blending sliders eliminated lights and darks from the underlying layer. Clouds increased in contrast slightly. The combination of blending sliders to isolate the desired area and masks to exclude that might get included otherwise makes for a fast fix.

jfriend

Color Burn on the beach

Antonio Correia wrote:

My daughter was in Maldives when she shot this picture. It is in CR2. I Photoshoped it to TIFF and then to JPG.
The sand is lost because it is too white. The sky is frightening but it was the reallity I presume...
What I am supposed to do for a better looking ? It is not bed now... Is it ? :
Thank you

This is a color burn layer filled initially with white with black painted over the sand with a soft brush and then opacity of the color burn layer adjusted to taste. Just trying to see what detail exists in the beach without doing anything fancy. Very cool photo BTW.

You could probably bring even more detail out of the beach by layering in a separate development from the RAW file where exposure is adjusted only for the beach and ultra-bright parts of the sky. If you want to post the RAW file somewhere, I'd love to play with it and see what can be done.