Two years later ...

It's amazing the difference two years experience can make. I took this image in 2009 but it has languished on  the hard drive for two years because I couldn't get it looking right. The main problem was noise. there were huge areas of noise in the mid-ground trees and even to reduce the noise to that level, there was excessive smearing of the distant details. In short it looked a mess.

Since then I have acquired better tools (Topaz) and a better understanding of how to use them. Installing Lightroom 3 this week, the original image resurfaced and so I took another shot at it using the new tools and a more refined workflow:

Now it looks the way I originally wanted it to; no visible noise and nice sharp detail all the way from the foreground rock to the mountains - 14mm, 1/350, f16, IS0800 (hence the noise problem).