I am sure I can get some ideas as to how to improve this having tried to get it to look anything like you can see with your own eyes which are really much better at this sort of thing.
I took this half way down the road into De Hoop Nature Reserve, Western Cape yesterday.
The white sand dunes are quite high and slowly encroaching inshore.
Lots of cake and not a lot of icing and as I have a sweet tooth, my suggestion is to remove approximately half of the sky above the cloud and a little of the foreground up to the point just under where the little mound is on the LHS border. I think this will make the interesting elements a little more dominant. I would then do a little LCE (see Roberts links above combined with a bit of sharpening) and I think that may lift the image... it will be interesting to see what the others think...
We have sand hills doing the same thing here in Australia about an hours drive north... I must get up there. Thanks for the inspiration..
Trying to compose these types of landscapes is quite tricky in my opinion, because the most interesting parts are the narrow sand dunes and the narrow band of clouds. If you didn't have the clouds, you could make the blue sky a feature and crop right up towards the sand. But with the clouds it is a balancing act.
I've taken the liberty of posting an edit, the quality is unfortunately not very good which is a product of working from the small file. I've run a Tonal Contrast at about 70%, some graduated neutral density filter then noise reduction on the sky (might not be needed on your large file), then a small bit of sharpening.
Never going to be an easy job to make a striking landscape which reflects what you would have seen. Shame.
Hi Ken,
I would definitely do a panoramic crop of your image as the interesting part of the image is in the mid third. I agree with Don and his comments
Best wishes and thanks for sharing,
Mark.