In looking at this photo there is a certain dynamism being setup between the clouds at least in the brightly lit area and with the crowd and podium speaker.

The scene looks like a commencement ceremony and those large lofty clouds with the central lit area has the appearance of a radiant light guiding these graduates to new beginnings.

Most people eyes will tend to move the highest contrast and/or brightest area in the image and this tends to be the white area within the clouds and it may have been through increasing the brightness but there is a lack of detail now in this part of the image.

If you have a program such as Photoshop of gimp then trough the use of masks you can play around with just the clouds.

The blue channel makes a good starting point and if you duplicate this channel and the apply a curves this mask (about 2 in on the top and just before mid-point on bottom a good mask is created. Just a bit of clean up in the white parts where the people where.

If you are not able to recover this detail, then maybe in another photo taken at the ceremony you could replace this area only.

As for the image to create a link between the 2 elements a beam of subtle light from the bright area to the speaker and crowd near him might re-enforce the though I had.

Also a little darkening on the left and right edges more so with the foliage and crowd to keep focus near speaker.

Niels Henriksen

Nielss last blog post..The Magicians