I was browsing through a folder of old RAW files earlier today and came across this one. I did try to process it at the time, but couldn't come up with anything I liked. Anyway, motivated by the fact that I don't have anything else to put up, I thought I'd give it another try.

This time around I decided to try an HDR version so used Photomatix Pro to generate and tone map a pseudo-HDR image. If you take a look at the original, you'll see that this version has a lot more detail and texture, especially on the surface of the object:

.../archives/the_entrance.php

The rest of the changes were fairly straightforward (Curves, Hue/Saturation, and so on) other than that I used the sky from the original image, not the tone mapped version. If you've tried single shot HDR's you'll know that one of the major problems is that they can be quite noisy. This doesn't much matter for textured areas of an image - such as the sand and scratched object in this image - but can be very noticeable in smoother areas such as the sky.

As always, let me know what you think.