Reader Question - Post Processing

A reader sent me a photo and asked me how would I convert and post process the image into black and white and a more dramatic scene. Skip to the bottom to look at the screencast of the PhotoShop work.

A scene like this is hard to capture photographically due to the large range og lightness/darkness values. The area around sun, even though the sun itself is behind the clouds, is completely white and therefore has no detail. To avoid this a Graduated neutral density filter could have been used to darken the brightest parts, while letting in all the light in the darker parts.

Now, into the digital dark room
When I work on an image, very often I notice details as I work with the image, and try to bring them forth or hide them as I see fit. With this image I noticed the sun rays after I did the conversion to black&white and added some contrast. Bringing them more into view without overdoing it was one goal of the post processing.

By using different curves adjustment layers and with different masks I could enhance or reduce contrast on different parts of the image.

Here is the finished images, and below is the screencast video of how I did it in PhotoShop. And here is a link to the original full resolution video for download. Aaand, if you want to take a closer look at the PSD-file, you can download that aswell.