Hi Jim,
I would agree with others the cyan is a little over, in fact the warmer tones in the image in general, not just the sky, also seem toward the cooler side. I think your point above is right on. I think each of us have had images where piling one tweak on top of another eventually leads issues.
The good news is that I like your base image; someone mentioned layers, you’ve got a complimentary sky an there’s depth to the landscape as well.
Here’s my stab at it. Well, scratch that. Looks like I overwrote my psd file and now I can’t refer to the changes I made, and therefore have no confidence the jpg I have shows any changes. I do recall a few things:
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Ed McGuirk’s processing trick for white balance. Basically open an empty unadjusted curves layer, go to options of the layer and make the below changes. Change opacity to suit. Now, I’ve found this works differently on each image - of course no image has the same color balances, hues, etc. But for the most part it’s pretty helpful in detecting and correcting color balance
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Another layer I added was a simple “Selective Color” layer and tweaked the neutrals, bumping the yellow a little, dropping the cyan. Played with magenta/green but don’t remember where I settled. If needed you could do the same for the whites. This technique is more about look and feel rather than numbers. Gut feel on whether or not you’ve altered the color balance, enough, or too much
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I’ve been using the LAB COLOR technique for a while and found the options and results to very effective. I wrote about this some time back and it’s in the Post Processing Discussion. What’s neat is that once you bring that Color LAB layer back in to your stack (it get’s converted back of course to your working space,) but you can use various blending modes and opacities for effect. Actually, at 100% the results look like crap, but at 20%, effective. I use Normal, soft light, overlay, Multiply, Color/Sat, The effect is very similar to the results if you add a blank Curves/Level Layer, don’t make any adjustments, but change the blending more to Soft Light. A good contrast enhancer.
Anyway, I’m really bummed I didn’t save the work, and sorry too late and tired to rework. But maybe I will
Thanks for sharing.
Lon