Help with blown out sky!

I've never truly edited a landscape before and was wondering how you bump up the saturation and more importantly, bring back highlights that are way overexposed but not fully blown. This one is the original;

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png'

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png'

I think your edit looks pretty good. It feels a little dark to me especially compared to the original but if your goal is to get back the sky you did a good job. Looks a bit odd towards the horizon to me but I have a feeling thats due to a flattening of the contrast curve at this part of the histogram when editing. Might be unavoidable if you are really wanting to get a deeper blue sky. Personally I don't find the original that objectionable.

Ah, Lightroom has a graduated filter function doesn't it, could play at the edges with that and not need to darkify the image so much. Is there any way to bring out the colours of the mountain more, it had some nice deeper colours there, much clearer than can be seen in the original or the attempt I made.

Well, Lightroom has the brushes and gradients that you can use to treat the sky and the foreground separately, so if like you say you want to bring more out of the mountain you could set a brush to maybe increase the brightness a bit and with some degree of saturation and brush over the foreground. Boosting the shadows a bit could help.

As to recovering highlight detail in the white clouds/steam, it's hard to say how much detail is there to recover. One thing you can do for a quick evalutation is to just pull your Exposure slider all the way back to the left and see how much detail gets shown. If you hold down Alt while you do this you will see blown highlights highlighted and decrease as the exposure lowers until the totally blown ones will be left.

Did you shoot it in raw? If so, I'd like to fiddle with it a bit and give you some suggestions based on the outcome
Apart from that, great shot and already a lovely image!

Could you please explain your photograph, as in what the h#ll happened?

Wow, great image. I played with it a bit in PS too. Here's my attempt to fix those highlights and brighten up the image.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

tom1s wrote in post #11988638
Could you please explain your photograph, as in what the h#ll happened?

Yes please... What the h#ll happened?

The volcano vented very suddenly so it was more spray and pray rather than worrying about metering. Any slider settings? These (mine) are just tiny jpegs of a massive raw file.

This photo has amazing Impact.
You feel like you just 'Have to Know' what, where, when.
I like the direction of the edits, although I feel it's necessary to point out that the OP doesn't have I.E.OK turned on.

That's a good reminder, David.

DJently, there is a forum rule that we should not post an edit of your image unless you turn on "IMAGE EDITING OK".

You do this in the User CP area in the Edit Profile window.

Great edit, Levina -- what a difference!

Spent a few minutes. Did not want to polarize the sky by overworking it. Also corrected the blue cast in the smoke.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

David & Tony, you are both absolutely right about the Image Editing OK bit. Can you believe I never checked that? I just saw the one edit and assumed it was OK.
To the OP: I apologize. If you want it removed, please say so and I will do so immediately.