This is the view from Xingping Laozhai Hill in Yangshuo, China, looking west.
I wasn't sure which result I would get from the pictures I took that day. I bracketed all my shots to have some security in post.
This image is composed of a series of 3 bracketed shots, +/-2 stops, plus another one where I masked the sun with my finger so I don't get any lens flare. I started by removing the lens flare from the base image. I added the overexposed one for the village and last the underexposed to get details in the sky.
I did some selective work on the colors and contrast plus a little bit of NIK Color Efex Pro to make the colors pop some more. The last touch being a warm tone slightly applied over the whole image.
I'm really impressed by how much information you can get from the raws.
The most annoying part was the branches at the bottom of the image. Not very useful but I couldn't crop it without loosing too much of the picture and cloning it out would have been too visible in that case. I cropped the image a bit though to make it less visible and I tried to attenuate as much as possible the greens and yellows on the leaves.
If you have any comment, please, let me know.
