Photography

Thank you. This is probably the advice I needed to hear. I know I will need to come back to photos again as my skills improve, but because this photo was so incredibly lucky I wanted to really lean into it.

And good tutorials you'd care to recommend that explain what they are trying to achieve? I just have a self taught process with Canon's DPP4 on RAW format, only working on brightness, as follows:

1. Turn on any over/under-exposed markers
2. Move the left slider to the right until it reaches non-zero parts of histogram and/or get under-exposed markers, move back a "bit"
3. Move the right slider to the left, unless reaches non-zero parts, or get over exposed markers - but go further if its only sky, and you don't care about it
4. The tricky bit, move the centre slider to the right if the picture seems "washed out" and to the left if there's too much dark in the part of the picture you care about - this is extremely subjective

Doing this, you make greatest use of the range of tones (shades, whatever) that the end JPG can offer, and get the detailed tone changes in the zone that matters... maybe.

Using the general brightness slider achieves similar but distinct effects - you might mix and match

This sort of activity should work in any tool. You might be able to do it for selected areas or colour, but I don't/can't. You might be able to tweak the curve more precisely, but likewise I don't try.