Drab-looking days don’t have to result in drab photos.  Often those drab days still have energy and aliveness that doesn’t show up in our photos.  Fortunately, we don’t have to stop there.

Here’s an original drab day photo that I took with my iPhone 5 on a muddy trail run in San Francisco:

It doesn’t do justice to the excitement I felt for this scene. Time to edit. My first stop is Snapseed which has lots of editing functionality to “set the base”.  The below image has global adjustments to contrast, ambiance, and brightness.

The scene is brighter but the image is still blurry. ShockMyPic does a great job of adding definition to images like this one without adding noise.

Much better but still not as clear and sharp as what I felt. So I added texture and warmth in DistressedFX:

I kept playing in DistressedFX adding an HDR filter and a Pourpre texture.

This step gave a great mood to the image but made it too dark and the texture at the top, despite moderation to 50%, flattens the image by bringing the background to the foreground.  I backed off to the earlier version and posted it on Instagram