Ian Yates wrote:
> I haven't got the selection part down yet. Particularly where
> mountains meet the sky. Always get that funky row of pixels that
> should blend better.

If you select by tools - lasso, magic wand etc. - it's very time-consuming to build a selection without "that funky row of pixels".

Here's the technique I use:

- Set foreground color to black (RGB(0,0,0))
- Menu "Select/Color Range", adjust "fuzziness" so that all the dark areas would be selected and the light ones - either not selected or at least much less than 100% (shown as black or dark gray in the dialog's preview window).
- Select/Modify/Expand by 2 pixels
- Select/Modify/Contract by 2 or 3 pixels (these two last operations close the possible small gaps in the selection area)
- Select/Feather by 4-5 pixels
- Ctrl+H (i.e. uncheck menu View/Extras) - so that we could see better what we are doing.
- OK, all preparations done, so now we can do some real work.
This means Image/Adjustments/Curves, and gentle push up the lower part of the composite curve with one point, and push its upper part back down in the vicinity of the end of the color range selection end.
This requires some time to do correctly.
- Immediately after presing "OK" in the Curves dialog go to Edit/Fade Curves and try to see if selecting "Mode: Luminosity" makes it better. If yes, press OK, if no - Cancel.

I've made for myself a couple of Photoshop actions for doing this (they differ in lifting different ranges of darkness), and they generally work well for images I got with my Minolta 7i (not so well for scanned film images - they are less consistent, and I have to adjust the values for each individual scan). If you wish, try to write to me, and I'll send them to you.