OK, to add to the bright skies/dark everything else theme and why I don't consider it bad exposure practice.
Before:
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I regularly go for a very early morning walk and take the camera, and I often end up shooting interesting cloud formations which are underlit by the rising sun. In this case the sun was just below the horizon. I exposed for the brightest cloud area using the E-M1's spot highlight mode because I wanted to keep the delicacy of the wispiest clouds. The foreground was in shadow because the sun is still just below the horizon. In real life the foreground looked a lot brighter than in the file as it came from the camera, it was actually quite nice, even light, but the difference in brightness between sky and foreground was far greater than the sensor could handle.
After:
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I have to say at the outset that the foreground here still appears darker than it did at the time, and so does the sky but I find myself losing highlight detail I want when I try to make things brighter in either area so this is my compromise solution.
What I did in Lightroom:
First I increased exposure to +1 which still left the foreground too dark but also started losing too much detail in the sky. To bring the detail back in the sky I reduced highlights to -23. I often reduce contrast as well with clouds but I didn't here. I raised the shadows to +38 and reduced the blacks to -25 in order to avoid the darker tones looking too washed out. The foreground was still way too dark so I used a graduated filter across a very narrow band just below the lowest part of the sky so it raised the exposure in the foreground very rapidly by a further 1.22 of a stop and also raised the shadows slightly, I added a very small amount of clarity in the basic panel (+7) but didn't push that further because it starts to look very artificial very fast in these conditions and did a very minor curves adjustment to lower the brightness of the darker parts of the sunlit clouds. Then some very gentle sharpening and noise reduction. Go pixel peeping in the shadows and you will still find some noise.
Did I get the exposure wrong? I probably could have given it a third of a stop more exposure, maybe half a stop at most, but I don't think that would have made a significant difference to the result. The brightest tones where the sun is rising are just short of clipping in both the before and after and I didn't want that area to tip over into clipping and start to wash out. I think this scene really is fairly close to the limits of what the sensor can capture in terms of dynamic range and I do think I wouldn't have got the cloud tones, which is what I wanted, if I'd given much more in the way of exposure.
