I said what I did about people not wanting to hear about time-of-capture because it is what I've seen on various sites and especialy here. I posted three or four long posts about it on another thread, and would like to repost them here, but I can't find it. After going to all that trouble with no responses, I mentioned there was more to it, but if there was no intrest, I'd quit posting. Someone posted that "that's probably best, because it doesn't address the OP's original question." Well, it did actually, but not in the "what button should I click on the computer to make up for not getting it right at time of capture" type of usual question. So I figured, why bother.
Nevertheless, I have a couple PMs asking for my thoughts and a few posts here expressing interest, so I don't mind sharing what I've learned about this during almost four decades, but if anyone knows the location of those other posts, it would be a lot easier to repost them here and finish it up.
Most want to shoot on auto and process on manual, but I have come to the conclusion that should be reversed, not because I don't know much about PP, but because I do. What many don't realize is that everything you do in PP doesn't just affect the target, but other things across the image spectrum. If you change, for example, the red channel, it doesn't just change red, but the hues of all the four primary colors. I learned this years ago when I was the editor of a high-quality magazine and also had to serve as the photo editor, which included color correcting chromalons made from slides. It's really pretty complicated.
Some PP is necessary, and just as during the film era, I can alway improve a shot slightly in the darkroom (PP), but my approach is to handle any shot that needs more than the most minor adjustments by fixing it with the delete button. This includes sharpness, because oversharpening causes all kinds of problems, most notably artifacts. Often, my final criteria for keeping a RAW image for processing it to blow it up to 100 percent.
In the meantime, someone asked me, in a PM I think, to further explain the cut-and-paste method I used for the picture included in a previous post. This is something, like HDR, that has to be planned ahead of time and includes two widely exposed images, one to enhance the sky and the other to expose the land. Both, or all, images are taken on a tripod with a remote or delay for mirror-up function. It only works when you don't have a tree or other complicated image running through both exposures, but a majority of scenic shots have a distant horizon that works with this method. In the case of the posted shot, it works because the rocks have even edges.
In PS, I first open the image that is exposed for the sky, select it with the "quick-select" tool and and select copy from the edit menu. Then I close that image and open the one exposed for the land. In the edit menu I click on paste, and move it into place. If both images were processed to the same size, it fits pretty well, but if there are some thin (usually lighter) spots along the edges of the two, they can be easily and quickly repaired with either the "spot-healing brush" or the "clone" tool.
Here's another shot of Elephant Rocks using the same method. Again, this is a good illustration of this method, because the sky was almost uniform grey and fairly bright, which is the toughest challenge for digital. No filters of any kind were used.
