This is a photo I took of the place my mum and dad got married, it's a pretty poor photo but it made an excellent challenge to see how much detail I could bring back from the foreground.

http://img79.exs.cx/img79/2104/P2070501.jpg

As you can see the foreground is very dark, I did the usual neat image (the sky made an excellent sample) did a curves adjustment on each channel individually and I changed the levels.

This brought back some detail, but not very acceptable. I played around with a few things and decided to mask off the sky by using colour mask in Corel photo paint 12.

Now with the foreground selected I was just trying anything, the result that worked best was running flaming pears chromasolarize. I think this is a free plug-in that can be downloaded from their website. http://www.flamingpear.com/download.html

Unfortunately this magnified the sloppy masking I had done earlier and I had blue coronas round everything, it was now my task to remove these. To got about this I duplicated the layer, used the undither tool set to colour and painted round the edges; now everything I had painted was grey. Now all I had to do was set the layer/object to green blend mode and the pink from the blossom stayed but the coronas went.

Finally changed the colour tone until it looked right and added some adaptive USM.

http://img6.exs.cx/img6/7093/church4.jpg

I may also have used screen on one of the blend modes, but it's hard to remember!!

Nice job on the pic. The only thing that sort of stuck out was the lack of detail on the roofs. Plus the foliage is quite dark. If you have PS CS, you may want to experiment with the Highlights/Shadows control.

Cheers
Dave

I don't have CS and have not found anything like it in Corel so far. Do you mind telling me what exactly it does, thanks Duv :)