Attempt at rescuing my photo

arangast wrote:

Hi guys, was hoping to get some input on an old photo that I've been trying to fix up.

It's a shot of Mount Fuji taken on my old Pentax K-M back in 2009, I actually bought the camera the day before to get some good shots but was disappointed with the results at the time - it was a very hazy day and the light wasn't good.

Thankfully I took this one in RAW and now that I have a better understanding of post-processing have been having another stab at getting something better out of it.

I played with the tone curve and did some shadow recovery + sharpening and noise reduction in RawTherapee then did some very small adjustments in Gimp (removed a blown out street light and attempted to reduce the glow effect on the top of the trees caused by the shadow recovery).

These days I'm used to doing some tweaking to improve my photos but this is the most drastic I've tried and don't know if there's anything else I can do to it. I know it will never be up to the level of all you guys on here but it would be nice to have a good pic to go with the great memory.

Here's the original:

My attempt:

...and finally a crop:

Thanks for looking and comments and criticism are welcome!

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Camera: Sony NEX 5R