I took this photo from our deck. I took several using different exposures and picked this one to work on. I liked the ominous cloud above and the slightly gold area in the center, and decided on the war/peace idea. I wanted to darken the sky and clouds and enhance the gold in the bright area. However, I didn't want to darken the foreground, and wanted to adjust the tone of the mountains to make a good transition between the forground and the sky. I chose not to use masking, but rather to use the gradient tool for the primary correction.

Using Photoshop, I first increased the saturation, but couldn't increase it very much as the bright area quickly became saturated and posterized. I chose to use color burn (my favorite of late) to darken and bring out the colors. To do this, I created a new layer with a blending mode of Color Burn, and called this the Burn layer. I set the background color to white and the forground color to about 50% gray, then used the Linear Gradient tool, keeping the foreground area (bottom portion of the image) white and the sky area (top portion of the image) gray. I did this by dragging the gradient vertically across just the mountains area. Fortunately, it took me only a couple of tries to get it right. This darkened the clouds and sky and brought out the gold. I further adjusted it by using levels to adjust the black point on the Burn layer. I still wasn't satisfied with the gold -- I wanted more. So I went to Hue/Saturation on the Burn layer and colorized that layer with gold. This enhanced the gold area and also gave a nice gold tinge to the rest of the sky and clouds.

These manipulations had the downside of bringing out the camera noise in the sky. So as a final step, I ran it through NeatImage which, in addition to reducing the noise, also softened the sky and clouds. I decided this was a good thing.