to capture the essence of the mountain for whatever reason. Most anything else I feel like I captured the sense of the moment, but not the mountains. Here is my latest shot:
<img src="http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/48848/image5.jpg">

- lacking in sharpness
- hazy on the left side (natural or not, it lessens the picture imo)
- it's not saying much to me from an "i'm up high in the mountains" perspective
- kinda looks tilted?

One thing to consider might be the time of day the picture is taken. Light makes a big difference.

Have you tried HDR? I'm waiting on my tripod so I can try it out. Some other members here have taken some fantastic photos using this technique.<ul><li><a href="http://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html">Here's an article about HDR</a></li></ul>

looks slightly overexposed and not super sharp. whats the exif? maybe too low of an f-stop, a polorizer may have helped? I do like it though.

don't misinterpret that.. The dominant part of the image is the large slope of dirt center image. Three things my eye is asking for... more black and more color, there's no pop. Blacks can be boosted, but color is non-existant. Move the slope off center following the rule of thirds. My hits the center of the image and doesn't want to move so it's easy for the viewer to miss the rest of the image. Last, from the orientation of the clouds it looks like the fall off on the horizon is natural.. but it looks like the image needs to be straightened. Right side of the horizon needs to go up.

This said, that's a killer job with stitching. I am not a landscape guy, and have never done panorama's so that's a great job to my eyes.

What we have here is - failure to pop. Stitching looks great. If you look at your original histogram, the left side (blacks) can be pushed up quite a bit, meaning LI-S4s comment about the blacks is right on.

<img src="http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/20538/image5_levels.jpg">

Here's how I did some pop:

1. Convert to LAB (something I've been working on lately after a hiatus). You can deal with the lightness and colors separately.

2. Shadows/Highlights at 15/5. Brings out some details in the shadows and tones down the highlights for the following steps.

3. Highlighted the Lightness channel only and did a Curves adjustment - brought 25 down to 22 and 75 up to 78.

4. Switched back to all channels and did another curves adjsutment, but this time pulled the a and b channels (from the dropdown) in by 5 on each side. Pulling each side in equally preserves your color balance. If you want to move the color balance a certain direction, pull the curves in different amounts.

<img src="http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/20538/image5_acurve.jpg">

5. Local contrast enhancement - unsharp mask at 10/50/0.

6. Last I masked off everything but the rock and the valley to the right of the lake and hit that with another Lightness channel curve to bring out some of the texture.

Original
<img src="http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/48848/image5.jpg">

Popped
<img src="http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/20538/image5_redo.jpg">

Shooting it with the sun behind you early morning would yield better results, but this shot can definitely be helped.

Guess that was what was lacking. I will give it another try next time.

Mask the sky so as not to kill the nice deep blue and bring the whites up a little...the snow is bordering on gray. I am using a calibrated display so what we see may be different.. But yes, nicer pop.

without perfect lighting they're pretty ****ing boring. If you're not prepared to wait, well then...

I can't see you EXIF but in general you really want to stop way the hell down. F20 if possible to get max DOF. A nice collection of 4x6 ND filters won't hurt either.

i find adapting to city shooting difficult now that i dont live in colorado anymore.