Recently went to Hawaii and took some pictures. This one below is of the Wai'Pio Valley. To get down in the valley you go down a road that is very curvy and so steep you go down about 1500 feet in less than a mile! They have no power down there and you can only go down with a 4x4 vehicle.

Here's a shot I took of the valley using a Olympus 2mp digital camera. I sold it to a friend, but borrowed it for my trip. I wish I could have afforded the 4mp camera before the trip, but I decided to leave myself more spending money and buy it when I get back.

Here's the two pictures:

Original: http://www.yuppicide.com/other/hawaii/p1010107.jpg
Edited: http://www.yuppicide.com/other/hawaii/waipio1.jpg

Lemme know what you think and I'll post another later. I was reading some tutorials/articles in some photo magazines I bought to read on the airplane. They were talking about hue/saturation, color balance, etc. Although I don't really understand all shadows, midtones, and highights stuff, I just played around until I found something good looking.

I definately don't understand Unsharp Mask thing. I don't know what settings to use for what types of pictures. I also don't understand what looks better when I touch the settings.

Hi Yuppicide,

Nice pictures. You've done a nice job in brightening it up.

Hope you don't mind, I've had a play with it, trying to get something with a little more contrast, to bring out the differences in lighting, and to make the valley more the focus of the image.

I applied a levels adj layer, and masked the valley centre so adj was only on valley walls.
I upped the saturation a little.
I applied levels to sky to darken a little, masked to leave ground untouched.
Lastly brightened trees in foreground to make them stand out a little more.

Nope.. don't mind people fooling around with my pics at all. I like what you've done to the sky. So basically you selected just the sky and applied whatever you did to that portion?!

When I get home later I'll post another picture I did. I have the picture on my website, but not the original for comparison. In total I took about 300 pictures from the trip, but only enhanced 5 or 6 so far.