I went trough some pictures from last year and found this from a trip to Iceland last spring. It was flagged as an ok image but I had not applied any editing more than lens correction and added keywords.
It was taken early in the morning at Goðafoss waterfall in northeastern Iceland and I was completely alone there at the time. It was a rather gray morning and I used my Nikon D750 with a 16-35 lens, at 16 mm, and Lee filters. A polariser, a 2 stop graduated ND filter and a 2 stop ND filter. At f11 the shutter speed was half a second.
I always shoot in booth raw an jpeg and straight out of the camera a raw image looks, well, just raw..
It kind of shows the gray weather and overcast sky but the reality was not quite as dull as this and I also, somehow, managed to get a heavy vignetting from the polariser, I don't know why since that is not normal with this filter and it is normally handling the wide 16 mm angel very well.
The jpeg straight out of the camera isn´t much better either. a little more texture in the sky and brighter shadows.
Just a little more texture in the sky and brighter shadows but all in all pretty much as flat as the raw-file.
I must have seen some potential in the culling process since I put a flag on it, probably for the nice texture in the water with a good amount of movement, so lets see what a bit of editing can do with a image like this. All editing are made i Lightroom and nothing in Photoshop.
That's a bit better. A rather subtle editing with corrected white balance and black & white points. The overall exposure is decreased and the light increased with local adjustment with some radial filter, brush and some more graduated filter in the sky to lift the clouds and get some drama and texture. The colors are enhanced in the water for a more natural tone with the HSL-panel and then some overall adjustments in the tone curve. Thats it, pretty subtle but a big difference and a much better interpretation of what I actually did see that early morning.