Treatment of Highlights in ASP

[pefunk]

There is this pic I took lasat year, boring street with colourful trees and plants, a bit of sea in the background and a lively clouded sky. But of course (again) too much dynamic range for the default settings (- sharpening) in ASP:

ASP default, no sharpening

No what do I do to recover the cloudy sky? The best I can come up with, playing with exposure, Highlight recovery, filllight, and BEZ still is not very satisfactory:

ASp best try

Just to demonstrate that the clouds are all there and can be recovered and thus this pic is not over exposed, here (no, not LR) the rendering of a programme that I happened upon just last week and that I have no real practice with: Sagelight 4.2:

Sagelight 4.2

If you have better ideas how to retrieve highlights with ASP here is the raw file: http://www.funken.biz/Bilder/Tenriffa_2 ... 174353.ARW

Peter

[claudermilk]

That nicely highlights (snicker) the issue ASP has. I tried Sagelight & could not get on with the UI at all; that is nice output though.

[pefunk]

I consider this output (Sagelight) sheer luck, I just happend to find some good sliders by accident. Well, less luck and more experience and two minutes fiddling resulted in this ugly flat HDR look:

[claudermilk]

I consider this output (Sagelight) sheer luck, I just happend to find some good sliders by accident.

That's the problem I had--it seemed results were more luck from poking at controls than it being intuitive. It's a shame, as the technical foundation sounds really interesting & advanced. I also hated the 1-file-at-a-time paradigm, way outdated & unacceptable these days.

[pefunk]

... speaking of poking at controls

more poking (but its all in the raw file)