Recovering an underexposed shot

I originally posted this in the digital-photography-school.com forums, but in an effort to collate all of my best articles I am re-posting it here. The original read as follows:

Hey everybody,

I thought I would share with you my latest experience. I went out this evening with the intention of getting some nice dusk shots of the sea shore but left it a little late and it was pitch black when I got there. I took some shots anyway which turned out completely under exposed due to lack of light even at a 30 second exposure.

So I got them home, imported a RAW file into photoshop and after a little bit of fiddling about I came up with the image below.

Here are the steps I took to achieve the end result:

Open RAW file in photoshop
Increase the exposure by 2 stops and then “open image”
Create an “Orton effect” layer by:
- Duplicate background layer
- Add gaussian blur to the duplicate
- Set blend mode to Soft Light
Add a curves adjustment layer to increase brightness
Flatten, rotate to straighten and crop final image

I just wanted to share this really as an example of how awesome RAW files are in giving you the ability to recover a virtual complete disaster.