Alabama Hills - re-edit (please comment)

Posted this awful example of my post-processing skills a few days ago:

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1442730

Here's a re-do, which I hope you will find is much better. Thanks for any comments.

It makes me ask myself, Where's that light coming from? The light on the white mountain that is...

This picture could be really awesome, but there is so much that looks "off" about it; the bright yellow light and blown out white in some of the clouds yet most of the clouds are super dark and ominous. The clouds are really dark over the left side of the snow-capped mountains, and yet except for the tip of the mountain, the rest of it (on the left) looks pretty light. Part of the middle range mountains is really dark and yet the foreground is mostly light, at least where the ground is free of vegetation. It almost looks like a mash up of landscapes under different lighting conditions. Can we see an unedited version of this?

When you were standing there in the Sierra with your camera, what about the scene spoke to you? What went through your mind before you took the picture and what were you trying to capture and convey with your photo? I think when you consider those types of questions while you are out in the field it will make your job when processing the photo a lot easier.

This photo doesn't work for me. When the subject of the photo (the mountains in this case) stretch across most of the frame, you really need something in the foreground to anchor and balance it. The foreground here is a jumble of brush that doesn't engage and draw the viewer into the frame. When you are capturing a scene like this, where there isn't a compelling foreground point of interest to compliment the subject, or where the foreground is very "busy" with lots of brush, rocks, etc, I either don't shoot it or I "simplify" the scene and cut through the clutter by using a wide angle lens and getting down on top and close to something in the foreground. It could be a couple of rocks that when viewed through a 14 mm lens, converge towards the subject. Or in this case, some of the brush, where maybe when the light hits it, it lights up with a warm golden hue. It takes the cluttered and uninteresting foreground and simplifies it, and gives the image something to draw the eye into the frame.

The processing should speak to what your vision was when you took the shot. It should highlight what makes the photo "work"and minimize anything that is distracting while presenting the image as whole in a way that is engaging and draws the eye though the frame.

The processing here does not do that. It almost looks like there are three separate shots taken at different times of the day pasted together. The sky, the mountains and the foreground all have different white balances and exposures that are jarring to the eye. The foreground has a heavy vignette with a very bright center, a technique that could work if you had something of interest in the brighter/highlighted part of the foreground, but here it is a barren dusty stretch of ground filled with brush and when they eye goes naturally to a brighter part of the image it doesn't find anything of interest that draws the eye into the frame.

The luminance and colors in the foreground, midground and background don't make sense to the eye and the brains registers it as "off". Something isn't right about the intensity of the light and the colors across the frame. What did this look like straight out of camera?

Bcaps pretty much said what I was thinking - looks like at least a couple of different photos. I'm curious what the original looked like.