LR4.1 before and after

[SmartWombat]

From the OM-D E-M5 shot in RAW to allow tweaking of the shadows and highlights.

[wfooshee]

It still amazes me how much stuff is captured on a RAW frame that you can't see when you start working on it!!!

I was going to suggest maybe that the outdoor part of the image got a little too much from the edit, maybe some combination of the two would work. I went ahead as a personal experiment and downloaded them to my PC and did that, made a couple of selections and copy/pastes, just a little tweaking, and the best of each makes a really nice image. Not knowing your "edit-me" feelings I won't post it, but you should give it a try!

[SmartWombat]

This was mostly global changes, not masked edits (I haven't got the layers plugin for LR).
I'm sure with proper layered/area selections it can be improved.

Go ahead and post your version!

[wfooshee]

Yeah, no layers would make life difficult if you're counting on having the ability. :cryin: But I know nothing of Lightroom, having never seen it.

I selected the lightened building interior, the car interior lower part, and the car interior roof part, as 3 separate pieces, pasted them onto the original darker image. I made all three sections just a bit darker than you had, so they didn't stand out as artificial, but they still left plenty visible features that were hidden in the original.

I spent maybe 20 minutes on it, and I wasn't real careful with the selection edges.....

[GB1]

That last post is definitely it -- it has good HDR qualities, taking the best of both images and merging them. Nice work, and interesting original image too,

G

[wfooshee]

Interesting that you used the term HDR. Something like this is what I've always believed HDR was for, and not the cartoony computer-paint effect you see so often.

But I didn't do it with HDR (and I know you didn't say I did, you're just expressing the result,) I did it with old-school copy and paste. We get the shadow detail we want, without blowing the bright areas as far, and we don't get the HDR artifacts of cartoon-paint and halos.