Hi Jerry. Glad we could be of help. Of the three v2 is definitely the best for me. From that stage, I would tend to use a gentle downward pull on curves (perhaps slightly s shaped) but only use it on the sky area by masking the layer. The difficult thing then is to make sure the edge after altering is not visible between sky and fg. Then I might use a gentle s curve on the land part, again masking and paying lots of attention to the areas where land/fg meets sky, and not producing any unnatural changes.
Hope that helps.

Lovely composition and colour. If it were mine, I would just try to adjust the darkened area of sky around the sun, as it is darker than the sky further along (especially between the sun and the nab). I think a little bit of burnout would be preferable, as it would look more natural. Hope you don't mind the comment. It's a lovely shot, and I think that would improve it.

edit - Dennis has left a similar critique. looks like we've posted at the same time. At leaast that suggests the change is worth a try.

Hi Steve. I agree with 'Ripleysalien' above about the very best times to shoot this sort of shot. Then you may not even need the ND's for a 2 sec exposure. What you would certainly need in most instances is a good ND grad (lots of landscape togs rarely shoot without, just because the sky is almost invariably stops lighter than the ground/water). Otherwise, you could take a couple of exposures - including one that gets all the detail in the sky, and merge that back in with the standard exposure image. Sometimes I find I need to do that as well as having the ND grad on. It's certainly worth trying, and it's worth getting out for the 'golden hours' for the quality of the light and colour in the sky.
Hope that helps.

What a lovely capture. Perhaps you could crop in closer to lose some of the twigs on the right, and make the robin more central? It looks like there is plenty of clarity and detail in the robin to cope with a crop.

That's lovely. The sunset is great, as is the pose, but I would prefer a wider angle to include more of the outline of the subjects, seeing as they are silhouetted. Having them filling the frame so much makes me expect to see more detail in the figures.

A big vote for that superb sky. As there is little interest in the fg, it may have been better to get nearer the water's edge and get some of that lovely light reflected, and the sweep of the waterline.

Great fun, and very scary actually. Hard to look at without a slight feeling of panic! The sepia treatment works well. You could google 'scratched texture' and see if there are any free images to download, then paste it in a new layer and set mode to overlay, or some other mode that gives the right effect. Then maybe alter opacity to suit, or create a mask and alter the srtength of it where you like. Hope that makes sense.

Here's a feast of shots! They do suit the mono treatment, and I especially like the feel of v7. I do prefer the lighter treatment of v9 but she's still got a blue cast. I've done a mod for my own interest and taking the blue cast selectively off her, but leaving the blue sky (and then even adding a warming photo filter just to Hannah) looks great to me.
Hannah likes v11, but I love v10 - the lighting really does work well, as we'd suspected. I love v12 too.

Lol. Never noticed it myself. Love the tranquil misty feel and gentle colours. I like the depth created by the fg bush, but would prefer there to be less of it - it seems to distract slightly by being too dark and heavy for the (very beautiful) shot.

Leigh