Above the Peak

[escape]

This is the unedited shot. I did try processing it but the result was two notches beyond awful. I'm going to let it sit as taken. Comments welcomed.

[pschlute]

I think you have two options here.

1. Increase the brightness and contrast in the clouds and selectively bring out detail in the mountains.

2. Do a b+w conversion.

In either case I would clean up the stray vegetation creeping in at the bottom of the frame.

I think the b+w version works best.

[Chataignier]

I think there is more scope than that. Firstly I would crop to square to position the bigger mountain and the bird off centre and to remove the bits of tree tops at the bottom. Then, looking at the histogram, there is nothing outside the mid range, so I would reset black and white points to give more dynamic range to the image.

After that, it's a matter of taste, in the example below I've increased the brightness and contrast of the sky, played with the luminosity of the greens and added a slight vignette.

Not easy to do much with a tiny file but, here's my take on it :

[Lovelabradors]

Nice shot, and I think David's edits do a great job of bringing out the beauty of the scene.

[DanK]

It's an interesting capture, but IMHO there are two basic problems: the image is dull, lacking in contrast (hence David's suggestion), and the detail in the mountains is mostly lost.

It's a matter of taste, but rather than try to increase contrast in the sky, I'd get rid of a lot of it. It has no interesting detail. And increasing contrast as much as David did created a halo around the bird and an unnatural graininess in the sky.

Here is a quick and dirty edit. I moved the black and white points in. I brightened the mountains and increased contrast with a curve only for that part of the image. I cropped.