To jimkil: Retouched Sky

[phwall]

Hi Jim,
So sorry for the belated reply, no excuses really, I'm just turning into an old slacker.
You know there isn't much work on the shot at all. I process everything through Lightroom 3. I use the pull down grad, correction brush and tilt control quite a lot. I find if I export directly out of Lightroom the quality of the shot is much better than going through Photoshop, particularly if you are going to the compressed size needed for TE.
For this shot I exported as a TIFF file so I could hand it to the printer. On my Nikon D90 the RAW file is around 12 megs, with corrections, sharpening and tilt adjustment the Tiff files are usually around 70 meg, so you do use up quite a lot of disk space.

With regard to the sky, I used a pull down grad with a 50% feather, across the entire top half of the frame, I finished the horizontal grad just below the buildings, and then dropped the exposure by .60 of a stop, I then ran a large correction brush with 60% feather across the clouds and buildings, here I increased the contrast and dropped the exposure by .25 of a stop, I also re sharpened just the buildings with another correction brush over the top of the large brush I used for the clouds and the buildings.
There are a couple of other areas I used the correction brush to selectively alter the exposure, like the building roofs in the foreground and the water.

Apart from that I let the pola filter take care of the sky with regard to blue saturation.

Hope all that makes sense.
Great to hear from you, looks like you are posting as infrequently as your truly lately.
Best wishes.
Pete