One that got away (with repost)

Hello everyone, hope you're having a great weekend!

I'm stuck at home and going through some old files and cleaning up my hard drive. I found this image buried under hundreds of images from last fall. This is from McClure Pass. I love the clouds but I'm not sure about the comp. Any ideas on how to fix it?

I adjusted shadow/highlight very slightly and kicked up contrast and selective color saturation trying to keep the blues from getting too weird looking.

Thanks for C&C!

Wow, Aleks, this is quite dynamic. There are some artifacts in the sky, you may want to create a separate layer of only the sky, and minimize the processing if you can. The upper left corner appears 'muddy' on my display, and the blues look more pastel than natural. The blown out highlights in the clouds need to come down a little as that is where my eye is drawn to. Overall, the composition is good; the leaves in the LLC are a minorly distracting, and of course the road may be an issue for some folks. McClure Pass is simply amazing for fall color! Thanks for sharing!

Well, Christopher's comments are spot on.
That's one dynamic sky, and the valley in the background is nice.

By cropping 1 1/2" to 1 3/4" off of the left (just before the small peaks on that ridge before it takes a dive), you lose much of the close foliage in the lower left corner and the 'muddy' area in the upper right corner.
Good to see you're using your down time wisely.

Very dramatic image! Love the clouds and colors.

Thanks guys! I decided to start over from the RAW file and not used the shadow/highlight tool to keep it from looking unnatural. I cropped off a little on the left and bottom. Then selectively brightened the foreground, added contrast and saturation (red and yellow). Then I moved to the sky and just burned some of the highlights and evened out some of the dark spots. It's not easy trying to control the highlights in the clouds with such a dynamic range so let me know if there is any improvement or if I should just give up.

Hey Aleks, this is a little tough. The elements and conditions are present, but there's not much to the comp that makes it a grabber. If this were mine, I wouldn't even consider hitting the delete button, but I probably wouldn't be making any 20x30-inch prints of it, either.

On my display the first one looks much better than the repost. ?

I tend to agree with Nat. I think the first one minus the shadow/highlight might be better. The 2nd looks a little flat and unsharpened. You might read up on Tony Kuyper's luminosity masks as a substitute for shadow/highlight (or even the fill light / recovery sliders in Lightroom are better) http://www.goodlight.us/writing/luminositymasks/luminositymasks-1.html

This shot has all the elements of a great shot but it doesn't quite come together for me. My eye is drawn toward the valley in the distance but the tree is blocking the view. So I think I'd like this shot better if the tree was more to the right or not included at all. For the shot you have, I might go so far as to crop it into a vertical image, with the tree on the right. Or go for a pano by cropping off some fo the top and bottom.

Thanks Grant for good tips. I like the idea of a vertical crop and here is what I came up with after your comments. I used the recovery slider in RAW, then the luminosity masks (first successful attempt, before I was getting nowhere), added contrast and sharpened. And of course cropped vertically. Even if I get nowhere with this image at least I'm learning a lot about processing it as it was a little frustrating. I wish I had more choices with composition here but this is the only one I captured. I think it started to rain as soon as I shot this. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal but sleeping with a wet dog is not fun.

Thanks everyone for your help!

I like the repost better, and I think I like the vertical the best.