Saving a photo

Sometimes things don't go well when you are shooting.  But that doesn't mean you can't dig out a decent photo from a lost cause snap.   Here is an example.

I took this shot of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse on a dreary day in the late afternoon under less than interesting lighting conditions.  As you can see, the colors are all washed out, and even though I tried very hard to set up something interesting with the local foliage, it just wasn't working.

I actually sort of wrote this one off, until I had a happy accident one day.  I was playing around with some black and white conversion workflows, and selected this photo as an object to test.  Since it was originally shot in raw format, I opened the image in ACR and started playing with it.  I was attempting to set the max and min black and white levels appropriately, when I accidentally grabbed the exposure slider and pushed it down toward under exposure.  That's when the magic happened.  It turns out that there was a lot of sky color hidden in the file, and underexposure let it show through.  I could have played around with the vibrance and saturation on the original and tried to save it, but that would have introduced too much false color, and really I don't think the result would have been pleasing.  But pushing the exposure down a couple of stops actually converted this into a totally different type of photo, with very pleasing results.  Here's the final after a little sharpening and cropping:

I think this is a nice, dramatic rendering that appears to be a twilight shot even though the photo was taken in the afternoon, facing generally east toward the ocean, away from the sun.

So, a couple of lessons here.  First, shoot in raw - it gives you many more options in post.  Second, look at your failures a second time, and see if there might be a way to save them.  This shot made Flickr explore, and you can see the larger version here.