I took the photograph above while exploring the Bandlands in South Dakota.
Processing Notes: I processed the image using Lightroom, in the process cranked the contrast setting almost all the way up and I also adjusted the Fill Light and Blacks sliders to get the shadow detail I desired. I then opened the image as a Smart Object in Photoshop CS3, created a New Smart Object Via Copy and used slightly different setting in Adobe Camera Raw. I mainly backed off on the Fill Light slider. I then added a layer mask to the second version of the image and painted in those changes to the darkest areas of the image to make sure they didn’t look too artificial. I did not do any further processing in Photoshop. The image below is what this photograph looked like when processed using default settings in Adobe Camera Raw, which I think is dull and boring:
