Kingaroy Supercell 2014Cyclic supercell thunderstorm at Kingaroy in Queensland.

When processing this into a mono image the main problem with this file was the shadows on the trees to the right were blocked up both in the colour and the black and white version. This is one of the issues when shooting a back lit storm, something has to go and In this case it was the shadows. Nevertheless to get this result.

I dropped an adjustment layer in and set the white and black point.
Slapped a new layer down and then filled it with 50% grey and set it to soft light, using a brush at varying opacity I paint on the layer with white to dodge or lighten and black to burn or darken. I then used a new Channel mixer adjustment layer and set that to monochrome and adjust the channels accordingly, making sure the total did not go above 100% and leave the constant alone. Next step drop a curve adjustment layer in and do a little tweaking, copy in the the copyright and signature layers and add a quick unsharp mask set to 25 and leave the rest at defaults and then output to jpg@300 dpi.