Thanks again Roman,

This is certainly more pleasant - the harshness has been removed and this is a great improvement. I think it still captures much of the emotion I was looking for. I am going to go back to the file and see if I can get similar results - I will probably also play with the cropping and straightening.

I do wish I could bring more of the foreground out, but recognize that I should have exposed once for the foreground, once for the sky, and blended the two together.

I would appreciate if I could ask one question. One thing I struggled with was getting the selection on the foreground (particularly the needles on the cactus on the right side) so I could isolate it from the sky. Did you use the color range selection for that? Are you sampling colors from the foreground first - then applying that selection? Or is it in the fuzziness slider? I can never seem to get the right combination of settings to get the selection I want. Any additional advice you can provide on this will be appreciated.

Thanks so much for all your help - you are really helping me improve my PS skills.

Dave