This is a wonderful sharing and learning opportunity so thanks to James and everyone who is making it happen.

Re the sky... In PSCS2, on a duplicate layer (pre-selected just the sky using the polygonal lasso):
1. Shadow/Highlight tool to set overall contrast between lighter and darker areas of the clouds
2. Select Color - blue
3. Hue/Saturation - enhance blue ...then deselect
4. Dodge - 10%, used a large soft edge brush to hit the highlights in each separate 'arm' of the clouds, in the center from which all the arms spring, and along the cloud/water/land line.
5. Switch layer to luminosity and adjust opacity to taste. This layer was merged as part of the finished image.

My wife looked at our pictures and said we should all ask ourselves if our overall lighting makes sense. After she and I talked about it and looked at the pictures some more I see what she's talking about. For reference, here's the original straight conversion from the RAW file:



The angle of the light source (sun, in this case) is tricky. It's in the middle above, but in front of the camera. The shadows make this plain, especially so with the large formation on the right. There seems to be a tendency to want to lighten up that area, possibly to avoid losing the detail that is there but in shadow. However, when that shadow is reduced too much it can be confusing to the eye/brain if the image no longer makes sense from a lighting perspective.