Ever since Ciaran posted his Iran Revisited thread and his link to how he achieved the finish I’ve been examining my workflow in Photoshop. I’ve been adapting some of Ciarans methods but also found some more for myself and had been experimenting on older images.
This one, as a lot of what I post lately, had been overlooked previously. I used a contrast method that applies a mask over an s-curve which is derived by the calculations tool, a 50% gray layer and the original image to create the mask. Ciarans sharpening method of 4 luminosity layers doesn’t do a lot for most images but can work well. I only used 2 of the 4 layers to give this one a bit of life.