The method I used for my attempt #4 is essentially summarized by my previous comment:
"...3. There is absolutely no reason to expect that you can match your starting image to the goal image using only one type of correction, e.g., just "curves". It is very, very likely that you will need additional separate adjustments of vibrance and saturation, as well as possibly hue, and you may also need increases or decreases in the local contrast, something that a global curves adjustment just can't possibly accomplish -- it can only adjust global, not local contrast. ..."
In my earlier attempts (#1, 2, and #3) to match my work on the starting image to the goal image, I used only global corrections. However, I found that because of the differences in the starting images (as described in earlier posts) this simply was not adequate. So, in attempt #4, I made separate selections for:
a) the sky;
b) the various ranges of mountains at different distances;
c) the trees at moderate distances (ie, not on the distant mountains); and,
d) the shrubs (NOT trees) at the very bottom of the image, ie, closest to the camera.
I then separately adjusted the color balance, the brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance, saturation for each using the camera raw tool in PS. This was adequate for everything except (c), the trees at moderate distance. Since, in our starting image, these were in bright sunlight there was a lot of local contrast (ie, bright highlights and dark shadows around each leaf / needle), I had to decrease this local contrast tremendously to get it to look like the low local contrast in the goal image. I did this by using the shadows/highlights tool set to a radius of only a few pixels on this area of the starting image.
It's tedious work, and it's easy to make the image look like an obvious composite of 4 separate images, but that's what I needed to do to get this level of agreement with the goal image. This amount of tedious post processing work is also why I strongly advocated "getting it right in the camera" in the first place.
HTH,
Tom M
