Hi Blake,
We often see great photographs of iconic landscapes and they look fantastic... and then when we get there and make our own photos they never look quite the same. One of the big reasons for this is not actually the camera we are using, or our photographic skills, but the weather conditions on the day. If you are making the photograph in hazy conditions when there is a lot of dust in the air, then the foreground will appear very clear and contrasty while the background will actually look rather soft and flat.
That is what has happened with this image. The foregound has a lot of colour and density and yet the rocks in the background are lost by comparison... the foreground is dominating the background.
With your image here I applied the Shadows/Highlights tool for the purpose of opening up the shadows in the foreground. My settings were Shadow - Amount: 50, Tonal Width: 50, Radius: 50, with the Midtone Contrast bumped to 30. I then selected the rocks with the lasso tool and apply a Curves adjustment... by nudging the foot and the shoulder of the Curves graph into one another you increase the contrast of the rocks and add more presence.
Now... here is one more trick you can apply to the image. If you want you can add a new sky to this picture... the simplest way of doing this is to use the quick select tool to find the edges of the sky, and then use the Gradient tool, with two very light shades light blue selected, to drop in a new sky. My final adjustment would be to crop some of the sky and the foreground so that the rocks become more prominent in the image, and then clone out some of the smaller, more distracting elements of the picture. Simple.
My preferred way of dealing with an image like this is to make the photograph using the camera's RAW mode, and then use a powerful RAW image processor to selective manage both the foreground and background. My usual convertor is the Adobe Camera RAW convertor (a built in componet of Photoshop) and I would use the adjustment brushes to add more density and contrast to the rocks while at the same time using another adjustment brush to bright the shadows and reduce the contrast on the background.
I hope this a help!
Image Doctor
The Olgas - Image Doctor's edited version
