Botched rescue?

I should've remembered dialing back to A from M before garbing the shot or at least chimp but alas - a couple hours work in PS made me happy. Not sure it even looks like a photograph anymore :) but the print hangs on one of my walls -

ever been there?

Raw

processed

detail

FWIW it looks fine to me. Not optimal, but so what? Be glad you shot RAW!

BTW I am surprised it took you that long to fix it. Then again I don't have access to that file so maybe it's harder than it looks.

BTW I am surprised it took you that long to fix it.

:) you'll have to exclude cigarette and coffee breaks. once you pull exposure down to catch the sky the foreground almost disappears. I didn't want to go through the graduated filter route so I went for HSL adjustments instead as overall, top 3rd is more blue VS red yellow orange rest. of course with some judicious use of curve adjustment, de-haze and microcontrast (to my limited ability that is). The painful part was bringing sky colour to anywhere near visually acceptable. Sadly part of a cloud (top left) got clipped beyond recovery but hardly noticeable in print.