Hi Nicole,
The sky in this photograph is wonderful, but due to the rather large contrast range you have lost most of the foreground detail; your dad along with the landscape are just silhouettes against the sky.
In this situation I normally try to open up as much detail from the shadows as I can while maintaining the sky. The simplest way to do this is to use a Curves Adjustment Layer in Photoshop.
In Photoshop go to your Adjustments Panel and select Curves. About now you should see a graph called a histogram; it shows you where the different tones are positioned in the image, with darks at the left and highlights to the right. What you should notice is that all the foreground detail, including your dad, are compressed into the darkest quarter of the picture.
To solve this we are going to grab the curves line (the diagonal line running across the graph) and we are going to stretch that line upwards the brighten the foreground. If you notice carefully in the bottom left-hand corner, I have also moved that little black marker to the foot of the graph to make sure my blacks are black.
You will discover that by adjusting the curves we have also made the sky go very bright… but there is a simple way of solving this.
If you now look at the Layers Panel you will see that you have the Curves adjustment layer positioned above the background layer. To the right of that Curves icon you will see a white rectangle that we call a mask. Click on the mask, and then select the brush tool; in the tools palette make sure that the foreground colour is set to black and then proceed to paint back in the sky. Its that simple.
That is how we use adjustment layers and layer masks.
Hope this is a help, Anthony!
The Curves Panel with the line adjusted to brighten the shadows.
Image Doctor's edited version
