What a beautiful place!



1. double conversion of RAW file - once for clouds/sky and once for everything else
2. combine to taste in PSCS2
3. flatten, crop and straighten, resize to 100 dpi and set desired pixel height and width
4. set black and white points with levels
5. adjust overall color using curves
6. increase saturation to taste (blue, green and yellow)
7. fine tune clouds using selective color (white)
8. dodge and burn selected areas to taste for best overall depth
9. reduce brush size and dodge ridge lines, rocks along shore etc.
10. selectively brush sharpen the areas dodged in step 9
11. stroke and frame
12. brighten a bit overall using exposure adjustment
13. convert to sRGB color space
14. save as jpg, quality level 11 for file size between 250 and 300 kb

* noise - I didn't apply noise reduction because in this case the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. I avoided contrast and sharpening adjustements in areas containing the most noise by using brush tools locally instead of making more global adjustments.