My approach to grade a landscape photo in Lightroon

Here, I am trying to share my typical work flow to deal with color grading landscape photos in Adobe Lightroom 2. (note: my photos is shot in RAW with Canon EOS 450D)

here is my photo. you can see its a overcast day with a lot of clouds and very little contrast.

I bootsted the exposure a little to bring up the sea.

I boosted the vibrance for richer colorful sea.

Now, using the gradient tool in LR 2, i lowered the exposure of the sky as well as boosted its contrast to see better details of clouds. I also turn up the saturation for richer color and even added the blue tint to enhance the blue.

Finally, i crop my photo for the panorama and also notice I try to crop with the rule-of-third in mind.

Some final tweaks boosting contrast and vibrance.

This is just some typical steps I do to most of my landscape photos but the acutual process will differ from photo to photo. I also spend more time to tweak individual color and split-toning ( and sharpening) to achieve the final look.

here's the comparison from start to the end.