I posted a before-and-after landscape in
landscape, but now I'm not sure if it shouldn't have gone here, in Digital Editing. Here's another pair, of Mount St. Helens from Windy Ridge, July 17, 2012, with a Nikon P7000 compact (1/1.7 sensor), from
jpeg. In those exciting days of yesteryear, even though the P7000 and its subsequent iterations were all raw capable, I didn't make the move until 2015, so the original of this picture is a jpeg (booooooo). However, I always congratulated myself on having discovered that the Big Secret to Digital was
never to overexpose the most important highlight, in this case, the clouds. In B&W analog we had a well-worn aphorism:
expose for the shadow; develop for the highlight. This worked best with sheet films that could be processed individually. Basically, you overexposed to get detail in the deep shadow, then "pulled" development so as not to block the highlight. I had discovered (I alone discovered, no one else ever knew this until I blabbed

) that digital seemed to be the the opposite:
expose for the highlight; "develop" for the shadow. Now, indeed, doing this, especially with small-sensor cameras and working in jpegs leads to
noise in the shadow, but I've generally been willing to accept it to keep from blocking the highlight, and along the way I've gotten better at noise control. Now I shoot all raw anyway, but I still watch my histograms for a big spike on the right. I know about Expose To The Right and I appreciate the idea, but I still work with smaller sensor cameras that are not as amenable to ETTR. I'd rather a little noise than a blown cloud.
Windy Ridge is slightly northeast of the crater and was dead in the blast zone. Most people visit the other vantage, Johnston Ridge, to the NW, where young vulcanologist Dr. David A. Johnston was killed in 1980 when the mountain blew up in his face
(Johnston radioed his famous last words: "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"). Johnston Ridge has a much better view into the crater, but Windy Ridge has this view:

- This is the original, untouched jpeg, exposed for the sky and clouds. That leaves the rest of the picture looking pretty blah. Incidentally, I often insist that I am no "purist" about much of anything, but this picture (as is) is the sort of thing that makes me wonder about the Straight Out Of Camera folks. Sure, I could expose for the whole scene and make a "better" jpeg SOOC, but then I will blow out the clouds. Just sayin'.

- This (obviously) is my latest iteration, finished entirely in Lightroom, and with not a lot of fuss. I think what I basically did was pull the highlights down, the shadows up, set a solid white and black point, and that's pretty much it. I didn't even need my favorite tool, the graduated filter. I cropped some from bottom that I thought extraneous. Those are Indian paintbrush in the foreground by the way. My wife loved them.