Good shot. Your strategy to use a linear gradient to darken the sky high up and not near the horizon worked to create good contrast with the mountains. There are a lot of personal options with this. You could crop the sides and perhaps even the bottom for a different image. Your choice of is it better or not. One thing I would do is try to process the image to result in more contrast between the barn roof and the forest on the mounains. In any monochrome conversion software this should be easy to accomplish moving the color sliders to achieve what you want. Your sky was typical of morning shots, but often these mountains create their own clouds later in the day. On my May shot, I added the clouds from another of my shots. The process is easy and you can poition the clouds where you want them.   Posted: 07/08/2026 02:29:32

The mountains stand out really well. The darkening of the sky at the top I think is rather sudden, I would have darkened it less.
For landscapes, I always try to place interest areas up close, in the middle distance, and in the far distance. Here, the barn is the middle distance. But as Stan points out, it's not easy to see due to its similar shade to the foothills behind it. So a bit of masking off the barn and dodging it to make it stand out would be a good improvement, and would balance the picture more.   Posted: 07/08/2026 19:55:36