Salvagable?

This is one from the archives, from our trip to the Painted Hills in 2005. We had mostly cloudy skies during our trip and very little sweet light.

I came across this shot in my files and thought I'd try to salvage it. What do you think? Is it salvagable? What would you do with this shot? What would you have done to enhance the comp?

Thanks for looking.

Looks pretty good to me, and I haven't even checked it out on my good monitor yet!

I don't know, it would take a lot of work to clone out that tree.

Mark...LOL, Rick could do it blindfolded!

I've never been a fan of the behind the tree perspective. The landscape there is so fascinating and dead trees can be found thoughout Oregon. I wouldn't keep the shot personally. I have a few shots from around this spot. The one in my portfolio here "Storm on the Painted Plains" is a good illustration of what I would have done differently from a compositional perspective. Although I admit I got lucky with the sky, I tried to use the grasses in a complimentary manner with more emphasis on the hills.

I see, so the tree would be an element of, but not the main subject.

I've shot that same tree from the other direction, but mine wasn't any better. Why? I think because the background hills are too low and small in perspective to frame the tree well. I haven't tossed the slides though. Sometimes I keep this kind of stuff just to remind myself that I should spend more time previewing the composition and less time clicking the shutter button. However - given a stormy sky, maybe a double rainbow, and a golden shaft of light on the tree, who knows? One can dream.

I like the tree.....do you have a shot of you standing to the right of the tree with the Painted Hill on the right and the tree on the left.....for me that would work better....Just my opinion....I love the clarity in this image...

Try this:
Change the mode to L*A*B (you will need to flatten) and open curves. Go to the A channel and move the upper left from (input/output) 127/127 to 100/127 and the lower right from
-128/-128 to -100/-128 such that the the slope still passes thru the center of the graph but is steeper. Don't be scared! Go to the B channel and do the same thing.
Turn preview on and off to see the difference and you will be impressed with how the above
images will be improved (technical). I'm sold on using L*A*B color space for contrast/saturation and most global color correction

That's pretty cool Doyle, thanks.