How well did I do? What could I have done?

[SolidBrowser]

I took this picture and photoshoped it and was wondering what I could do better and what I did do correctly... Just so I am on the right path...
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[Inkz]

You've done a fairly decent job getting rid of the thistles and people....

But the sea is looking too blue. Kinda distracting.

Good job though.

 

[ibclare]

Yes, you are. Definitely on the right path. Nice cloning work. I have a few suggestions.

There is a discrepancy in the darkness of the sky and the brightness of the landscape. The lighthouse also gets lost in the scene except by virtue of how bright it is.

I played around with it. Here's what I did. Hue/sat adjust the sky, lower sat and brightness. Levels on the front rocks to darken them using the gamma slider mostly and a touch of black, and also applied a .4 guassian blur. Then I painted shadow on the lighthouse and the rocks, on a separate layer. Finally I cropped it. Here is what I came up with, cropped slightly differently. I know it can be hard to crop when you really like the elements you are removing. I have a fix for that. If you don't want to crop out any of the FG for example, select it, make a temporary new doc for it, crop your image, then bring in the fg and transform it. Well, that's if you decide to crop at all, but you can always keep the idea for another work.

These are just my ideas for you btw. One thing all artist's need to learn is to take criticism and apply it as they best can.