"Tweak this image" CS2 RAW challenge

I'm wondering if it's possible to tweak this image, using curves in CS2 RAW, to have both the building and the sky well exposed. I'd like to see a little detail in the clouds as well as seeing the building and what's around it. Is this possible? You can download the CR2 file here (8MB, fast server).

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Here's a quickie I did in RSE using 2 "exposures".

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I took a try at it, but there really isn't much you can do. The sky is too blown out. I did get some more detail ou of the hill behind the building though. To get what you want, you'd need to take two pictures, one exposed for sky and the other for the building and combine them.

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Maybe you missed the point of RAW? Which is what I did in RSE - I "took" two pictures.

I was just messing with highlights and shadows...still has a halo around it though.

My take on it.....

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Thanks everyone. I know the sky is pretty well blown, but at EC-2 or so it's not quite as bad. I can do a blended exposure technique fine, I was really wondering if it was possible to do something with curves in CS2 RAW to give the sky more texture without messing with the rest of the picture too much. Is that possible to do?

What no winner?

I thought at least the winner got to design your new business card. *winks* No honestly, It's hard to fix the sky directly in Raw... you could probabaly use the feature I was trying to do "manually" in CS2... I forgot the name now... it's like using two exposures and you compile them into one. Uhm... it's called... uhm... 32 bit Hight Dynamic Range (HDR) support. Dunno where it is, but it should be there and it should work with seveal mixed copies of one image from Raw.

High Dynamic Range doesn't work with multiple exposures from the same RAW - or at least i've never managed to get it to work, which is consisitent with the googling i've done.

You want a winner? I like your one best overall CyberPet, though I like ByteTheBullet and PhotosGuy's sky better. If it weren't for the funny boundry on PhotosGuy's pic I think i'd like that one.

Well, I said it was a quickie. Just used the magic wand, which I hate, but it was fast. The technique works, but isn't the CS fix requested, so why waste my time doing more?
I haven't used curves in PS since I started processing in RSE. I love it!

Here is my try at the dynamic range. It lacks a little contrast, but that can be fixed.

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How'd you do that Jason?

I actually got the RAW to work in Merge to HDR with multiple conversions of the same RAW file. You just have to finesse it a little, or simply "trick" PS into thinking you took the picture multiple times. To do it, I did three conversions, one at -2.0, 0.0 and 2.0. Then I applied a slight curve on each of them. The reason I did this is so that when PS does an analysis on the photos, it doesn't find a direct correlation among the photos if we did just a straight exposure compensation. Then the next step was to save the photos in a format where EXIF isn't stored like PNG. Then I did the Merge to HDR feature. It comes up with a dialog box asking for the exposure values. I plugged in F2.8, 1/400, and ISO 200 for the EC 0.0 one and 1/100 and 1/1600 for the EC -2.0 and 2.0 ones. Then it did its thing and merged them. All that was left to do was to drop from 32 bit to 8 bit mode. I used the Exposure Compensation and Gamma setting with values of -4.5 and 0.6. Then I did a little local contrast enhancement to bring it out a little.

What a great trick, thanks! Do you really need to save as a format that doesn't store exif information? What a pain.

I don't think this photo is salvagable, but that's a great trick to use for other times

I don't know for sure. I suppose I could try it without that step. The reason I did both of them is that I didn't want PS to get wind of the fact that I just converted the same RAW file three times. Try it and see, let me know if it works.