PP question - I'd love your opinion

I have been reading lots of books, forums, online training (even taking photo's )to take better shots with my new 450d but I'm stuck on the PP side of things

I was lucky enough to be given Lightroom and CS3 which I have played around quite a bit with but I'm strugling to know what the best settings are?

The books etc... say to adjust contrast etc... etc... to my liking but often by the time I finish I prefered what came right out of the camera?

I've attached a shot from this morning (converted from Raw to JPEG) with some adjustments but would love your opinions as to what settings would be better.
I posted this in the canon forum but may be better in here.

Camera: Canon EOS 450D
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/4
Focal Length: 23 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV

Ok,my version:

You may want to do some more reading about Lighting, White Balance and Sooting Raw. Your Photo is at Sunrise or Sunset. There is magic in sunlight at thees time. Photography is all about lighting when it come down to it IMO.... Lookup the golden hour.....
--
JJMack

Ok, so far I like your one better... What did you do? It looks like bumping the saturation up but when I try it it looks fake???

Tomas Hedström said:

Ok,my version:

Click to expand...

Used PP. For the sky:

I created a new curves adjustment layer and set the layer blending mode to multiply.

I painted the layer mask so only the sky and the lower parts of the image got darker.

For the bush:

I created a new brightness/ contrast layer. Adjusted the contrast and brightness very high and painted the layer mask so only the bush was affected with the increased brightness/ contrast.

Thats it. 2 minutes of work. I hope you understand how I did it.

Tomas

opinion only.
I shoot only Raw.
I love sunrise and sunsets.
I will play around with F stops and usually the WB.. cloudy and shade.

Try it
--
Best Regards
Gale

http://www.pbase.com/techwish

http://porg.4t.com/KentC.html
Actions
http://www.atncentral.com