opinions on this photo?

[SanCap]

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask or not but I'm trying to improve my photos so they aren't as dull. I often fly in the desert and most pictures come out semi colorless looking washed out and the sun can make it worse.

This was my first ever attempt at editing a very dull uninteresting pic in lightroom. This was with protune off from my gopro 3+. In the original the sky was a bit washed out by the sun. To the left corner the sun was shining.

I tried to bring out the blue in the sky and make it more colorful from the bland looking desert.

Did I over do it with the color or does it still look like a real photo? Comments are appreciated.

This was the original photo btw

The top left bright sky is what ruined it for me and as someone else said a little more rock detail would be nice. I am an amateur but played with it in photoshop a bit. Here is my version.

Thanks for sharing that. Do you mind me asking what some of your workflow steps were in PS? I'd like to learn enough to repeat similar steps to not spend a ton of time in my post.

I did forget to say that it is a very nice photo. My work flow was to clone some good blue sky from the right side of the photo to get rid of the blown out sky on the left, then add a bit of blue neutral density in the sky, then add some tonal contrast (to bring out the rocks) from a filter kit from a photoshop plugin called Nik Color Effects Pro 4, Then just a bit of brightness and contrast. I may be doing it backwards, I am sure a photoshop pro will tell me, but the photo looks pleasing to me.

 

[knuckles]

I did forget to say that it is a very nice photo. My work flow was to clone some good blue sky from the right side of the photo to get rid of the blown out sky on the left, then add a bit of blue neutral density in the sky, then add some tonal contrast (to bring out the rocks) from a filter kit from a photoshop plugin called Nik Color Effects Pro 4, Then just a bit of brightness and contrast. I may be doing it backwards, I am sure a photoshop pro will tell me, but the photo looks pleasing to me.

cool thanks for those tips. I have a lot to learn about PS. I've really been concentrating on flying and getting to cool places to fly more than editing. Really until now I've only done minor adjustments in Photoshop Elements but I just got the Adobe cloud with Lightroom and PS. That was my first attempt ever using lightroom.
I will try to spend some time learning when it's too windy to fly anyway. thanks again for the comments

 

[jason]

I did forget to say that it is a very nice photo. My work flow was to clone some good blue sky from the right side of the photo to get rid of the blown out sky on the left, then add a bit of blue neutral density in the sky, then add some tonal contrast (to bring out the rocks) from a filter kit from a photoshop plugin called Nik Color Effects Pro 4, Then just a bit of brightness and contrast. I may be doing it backwards, I am sure a photoshop pro will tell me, but the photo looks pleasing to me.

cool thanks for those tips. I have a lot to learn about PS. I've really been concentrating on flying and getting to cool places to fly more than editing. Really until now I've only done minor adjustments in Photoshop Elements but I just got the Adobe cloud with Lightroom and PS. That was my first attempt ever using lightroom.
I will try to spend some time learning when it's too windy to fly anyway. thanks again for the comments

If lightroom has a unsharp mask in the sharpness control use a little to bring up the detail in the hole scene.