This is more or less how the scene appeared to me when I shot it:
Notice that the only things that are in focus are the large weeds in the foreground. Everything else is a bit soft. I’m fine with that.
Here’s how the image looked when it came out of the camera:
The lower half is dark and muddy. Something needs to be done. I began by equalizing the pixels. Don’t worry about just what that means, it’s a single menu option in Photoshop: Equalize.
I like that, I like it a lot. Though it’s not what my eyes saw – the color’s certainly off – it clarifies what’s happening with the light. I’m looking south and the sunlight’s coming in low from the left. Everything below the elevated roadway is in shadow – notice the dark line to the right of center, ‘cutting’ through the vegetation. Everything below the line is in the shade; everything above the line gets the sunlight.
In this image I de-saturated the blue a bit:
The weeds in the foreground are now much more visible than they are in the first picture. Still, the color’s a bit unnatural, though if I were painting the image, I might well go for the unnatural color.
To produce this image I simply converted the equalized image to gray scale:
Finally, in this image I took the equalized image and ramped up the saturation for reds and yellows: