HDR without changing the color. The L-channel of Lab.

Can we use HDR without affecting the color? Yes. This tutorial shows how. The first picture is a badly underexposed photo taken at the old cemetery in San Juan Bautista. Oh my.
The real problem is the California brightness range. It's either catastrophically underexposed or it's about to burn out the highlights.

I converted it to Lab and then just captured the L channel and formed a new image with it. I left the color channels (a and b) alone.

I then ran that black and white image through Dynamic HDR selecting 'eye-catching' and using pseudo HDR (just the tone-mapping part). This result already shows a lot of promise with wide-open shadows and what appear to be non blown highlights.

I pasted that transformed black and white picture back onto the L layer of the original. Voila! But notice that the colors are not changed or distorted. It still needs some work but now, at least, that further work might actually succeed.

To finish off I made a brightness mask with a Gaussian filter and a radius of about 7. I then selected the dark areas and lightened them with levels. I pumped up the saturation a bit. No contrast enhancements or sharpening. There was never any color in the grass or the ground and so none was introduced. This is a long way from the original.

What's really curious about HDR is that shadows have lost all their power. Shadows are crucial for any kind of pictorial realism but they don't have to be inky to work. In HDR the shadows are there, the eye knows that they're there. They define the scene just fine - the way that they're supposed to. But they've lost their power to obscure.

One nice thing about this variant is that there appears to be full detail in the brightest and in the darkest parts of the picture. Compare to original.