Please post your entire work flow. Break it down as much as you like....
Here is an image that can use some help...
Hmm, no takers? OK, I'll give it a go...
Step 1: straighten and crop. No point wasting time and effort on correcting colours you're going to lop off anyway.
Step 2: Shadow, highlight, neutral. This pretty much always comes first. It's a rare image that I don't do this on right at the start. Shadow for this image was under the rocks, left of lower centre. Highlight was the breaking wave on the extreme right. To be honest, these didn't make much difference because this image already uses just about all of the tonal range. Neutral was tricky. There's no obvious cast to this image, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Instinct says to try biggest rock, in the middle, but that's got a bit of natural colour in it. It's very slightly reddish yellow. I settled on a single neutral (LAB mode) on the second rock from right, the one furthest out to sea.
Those 2 steps are almost always my starting point for any image. Now it's time to look at the image to see what needs correcting.
Step 3: Lightness and contrast. The image foreground is too dark and dull, while the rocks are bright and risk losing contrast. Mike and Greg won't thank me for saying this, but I always fix these issues with the Photoshop Shadow/Highlight filter in LAB mode. I find it more flexible that fiddling with sections of the LAB curve. On this image I boosted the shadows with 15%, 80% and 30px, then pulled down the highlights with 15%, 60% and 30px. The result was a bit harsh, so I turned down opacity on that layer to 65%, ensuring I kept the detail now found in the reflections in the water.
Step 4: Saturation. The image now looks tonally correct, but it's flat and the plants in the foreground look somehow wrong. Back into CM in LAB mode and boost the colours using the slider. This made it better, but it pulled up the faint colours in the rocks so they looked all wrong. Reset that and try again. This time Ctrl-Click on the big rock to set a point on the A and B curves, then try the slider again. Much better - the colours boost around that point on the rock, leaving the rock colours themselves alone. I whack the colours right up to silly "Man from Mars" levels then reduce the opacity of the layer in PS to about 30%. (Mike, can I
please have this 'fading' facility in CM? :))
Step 5: Splash colours. The colours are now looking about right, but there's no, er, "oomph" in the image. The focal point should probably be the red moss (or whatever it is) in the right third, so it's back into CM to try to boost this area. I needed to lock the blues and greens, and boost the warm colours. That's easy in LAB, so I pinned the cold halves of the colour curves, and steepened the warm halves. The yellow part of this correction had a pleasing effect on the plants - they look a bit healthier! Note from the curve image attached that I put a couple of points just inside each of warm halves of the curves. These prevented boosting of reds and yellows outside the required area. (For instance, the brown earth on the outcrop to the left of image looked silly with the whole magenta half boosted - it went red! Fortunately pinning down a bit more of the magenta curve fixed this - no need to fiddle with masks to keep it out of the correction.)
6) Sharpen.
Unsharp mask, as usual. Tricky image to sharpen this: it's high frequency, and doesn't need much. I gave it 70% at radius 0.4 on the L curve, then faded that to 50%.
This all represents a fairly quick correction, as I typically use on images that come out of my DSLR. It could benefit from more advanced techniques - the plants in the foreground in particular could be brighter and more cheerful. If I had more time, I'd try the "Greens of Nature" technique in the LAB book (pg 47) to bring them out.