Make this one A postcard....Maybe not Perfect...

[ggroess]

Welcome to the First week of the Curvemeister 101 class.
This week is about showing off what the plugin can do and various ways you can add it to your workflow. 

For many of you this will be new territory but for others this is a chance to show off.
Take this image as far as possible and please describe what you have done to the image to improve it.

Have fun!
Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Step 1  inLab,find a neutral and a shadow point 
Step 2 on a new layer,after selecting sky, move highlight threshold a bit closer to body of histogram,keeping balance
            with foreground
Step 3 deselect sky and raise saturation to 1.19  GregM

[ggroess]

Greg,
Seems like the shadows are a bit too blue...
BTW
I am going to start this out by posting my Rough out notes.  I have taken to making notes right on the image as a new layer and keeping that layer until the end.  It helps me to focus on the things I identify as needing adjustment and allows me to review at the end to make sure I hit all the items I noted when I started out.

Greg

[ggroess]

I decided to see what would happen if I tackled the contrast first.  The image looks much better after using Curvemeister on the individual channels and replacing the blue channel which was quite flat with a copy of the red channel that I had curved to increase contrast.

I also fixed the horizon problem with a slight crop...

More to come....
Greg

[sjordan93436]

Set highlight and shadow

contrast per channel

color boost with CM.

Masked the sky and contrast and color boost in LAB

MMM latest version.  But it left the yellow and red over the top.  (perhaps it still is)

Lab pinned the upper half of A and B and reduced the positive a and b only.

[ggroess]

I would agree it is over the top.
This points out a weakness in the MFM script. 
You have less control over the results and need to run it multiple times  with slight selection changes to get a result you like.

Stay tuned and see if we can do better....

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Image with a little blue removed from and a little contrast added to the midsection.GregM

[ggroess]

Still kinda Blue in the shadows Greg...

[ggroess]

The Next step is a "By the Numbers" correction in RGB. 
Open the image and copy the background layer.

Open Curvemeister and Correct in RGB by the numbers so that the shadows and the highlights are neutral or near neutral.
Pay close attention to the clouds as they are going to cause you to have problems later.

The clouds are pretty bright and very close to the highlight area in brightness...
They are however far enough away that you can get most if not all of the color cast out of them.

Next Step Color Boosting...Where we can meet or beat MMFM...
Greg

[leeharper_admin]

Here's another swing at it...

I took lots of screenshots to show how I corrected the image - I'll upload those in a little while. Greg - good call on the horizon, I would have missed that!

Cheers,
Lee.