Wispy Cliff Tree

[fx101]

While taking a nice hike, I captured this photo with my D80 and the Sigma 15-30 lens (f/4 if you are wondering). This was probably one of the scariest places I have ever photographed from-- there's a column of gale force winds that blow up beside you and the trail is only wide enough for one "healthy" person. Thankfully I have a nice Gitzo Basalt pod that allowed a good shot in such a cramped environment. The workflow consisted of Nik Sharpener Pro's RAW pre-sharpener, Adobe Camera Raw, DXO to get rid of the distortion and slight CA, ran it through Nik Viveza, altered curves in photoshop, ran it through Alien Skin Exposure's Velvia 50 simulator, increased exposure, lowered saturation and finally ran Nik Sharpener's display filter.

I'm curious to know how I can improve the colour of this image (warmer, more/less contrast, saturation, brightness, etc.)
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[jkriminger]

um, ocean is very tilteddd, needs leveling. It looks plenty sharp..almost too much. I would layer the ocean and sky seperately and lower levels on them..should bring out some definiton in the clouds and richen the ocean a little deeper. If you were to layer that log and adjust hue/saturatuion on it you could get some nice red/browns to pop some.

Seeing your tagline allowing edits...I played with doing exactly what I suggested..some overkill here and there. I think the main problem here is the time of day..pretty bright sky. An example...have deleted this from Photo Gallery

[fx101]

O.K. I have reposted this image. The following changes occured: I leveled the horizon using the "lens distortion" tool in PS. Using Vertus Fluid Mask I masked out the sky and the ocean and separated them into different layers. Using the levels tool I brought out the shadow/highlight detail in the sky. Since the sky was blown out, there was heavy noise when I exploded the sky. This called for noise ninja. Since the sky ended up "painting-like" as a result of N-Ninja, I used unsharp mask to give it a slight edge. The exposure tool was then used to keep the lighting consistent. As for the ocean, one of its main pitfalls of the ocean was it was too light and uncompelling. Some work with levels and a warming filter fixed this after boosting the saturation. Eventually, I lowered the saturation and blended in the sky and the ocean using the blur and clone tools. I noticed my initial post was oversharpened, I lowered the Nik Display Sharpener intensity for this one. I also realized this picture lends itself well to a cool semi-saturate due to the cloudy day. I did so; however, I needed to emphasize my subject. The "render light" tool easily fixed this with a spotlight on the tree. I'm interested in how the tones and such can be improved from here.
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