Pictures By Alan

The contrast in the original is extreme, with the shadows under the walkways as well as bright sky. The detail was in the raw image, so I tried a new technique to salvage it: I got two interpretations of the scene, one with exposure at -2 to get the sky detail, the other at almost +1 to hold the shadows. I used curves to scale them both from 0..100% to 0..50% brightness, so each was rather dark, then selected one and applied it to the other with an add operation. The result was an image holding detail across the whole range - probably 10 stops altogether. It took additional manipulation to arrive at the final image, but this does seem to be a promising technique for preserving detail in high-contrast scenes. You can see the unedited jpg here.