There is a small cove near where I live that is usually a good place to photograph waves when the ocean is rough. The show on Sunday was not as good as I had hoped and I have seen better. Nonetheless, I did get a few decent shots. Here is one of the better ones - Middle Cove Beach, St. John's, Newfoundland

Overall a nice shot.....But because your original shot sky is so dull and blurry you need a bit of colour contrast in your photo between the crashing waves and the dull sky. Also the cliff shadows need to be removed on the far left. And because the shot was taken at a slightly lower shutter speed I guess, the splashing water in the centre has almost blended into the sky. To achieve this you have 2 options, one is to replace the sky all together (which I always avoid doing) or the second option was to darken the sky further and add a bit of contrast to it to define its line. I have tried editing your shot posted above (hope you don't mind) and have tried to retain the same mood when it was taken. See whether you like it...

Kathy, beautiful scene, and raw nature playing boisterously!
Like the bit of pop @Yezdi added!

Great composition on the shot... Hmmmm... I'm torn on the background... maybe something between...I would in an ideal world like some more separation for the overspray, maybe rather than adding blue to it just try bringing the exposure down a little on the background..

Very beautiful, Kathy! I prefer the first one, less textured and more natural.

Very beautiful image Kathy. Like Cristobal I prefer also the first one

I was thinking something along these lines... Using Kathy's sky... but creating a mask using Topaz mask AI and I brought the exposure down 1/2 stop. I think it adds to the mood, and really makes the overspray pop more... of course you could bring the white up a touch more and maybe bring some of the blue out in the water as well but I kind of like this as is... but everyone is Different.

Effectively, Gordon, we see more the differentiation beetween the sky and the waves.

Cristobal said:

Effectively, Gordon, we see more the differentiation beetween the sky and the waves.

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Right! and it's not changing the scene more than someone bring exposure up or down... I do have an Idea that I'm going to be trying after work that might make this real interesting going forward.

Very nice, Kathy!

Thanks everyone for the kind comments and suggestions. I did try to make the sky a bit darker but I was getting an effect like noise. There was a lot of sea spray in the air when I was photographing. Although I did clean my lens a few times, it didn’t take long to get covered in white dusty salt. I find when this happens the photo looks noisy ( it wasn’t ISO which was around 1000). I did use the denoise part of my software before exporting into Nik, but with a few adjustments in Nik the noise reappeared (probably the contrast). Decreasing the exposure on the sky also made it worse. You can see this grainy effect in Yezdi’s version - which I do like, but not the grain. Gordon’s version doesn’t show the grainy effect, so I will give that a try tomorrow evening. Work is busy this week .... But, Gordon indicated he has some ideas and maybe he will post these before I can get back to editing!

I ran DeNoise on my edited version and below is all I could achieve. It also maybe because I am using the downloaded file which is in kb size.

That looks better Yezdi. My denoise (part of DXO) is good but only works on raw. I can try regular denoise on TIFF.

I ran Denoise on the original image before I did anything. Created the mask on the 2nd image ( masked out the sky) so that cleaned up the sky from looking grainy... then did an exposure adjustment on the first layer of -1/2 stop. That is how I created the image above....

Kathy G said:

But, Gordon indicated he has some ideas and maybe he will post these before I can get back to editing!

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So I did my little experiment and came up with this.... I took your original image created a mask this time masked out everything but the sky... Once I got that I took the sky from your image did a content aware fill to create a new layer filled with nothing but your sky.. ( ran it though denoise to clean up the grain) I took that and was able to import that into the both Photoshop 2021 and Luminar so now when doing a sky replacement I can fine tune not only brightness but white balance, lighting ETC... it works , but the results were no better than the first attempt because of the limited masking in both Photoshop and Luminar. but the theory works and works very well.
Kathy I'm not sure if your software can do this so I'm not sure if this would help you or not.

gordon_g said:

So I did my little experiment and came up with this.... I took your original image created a mask this time masked out everything but the sky... Once I got that I took the sky from your image did a content aware fill to create a new layer filled with nothing but your sky.. ( ran it though denoise to clean up the grain) I took that and was able to import that into the both Photoshop 2021 and Luminar so now when doing a sky replacement I can fine tune not only brightness but white balance, lighting ETC... it works , but the results were no better than the first attempt because of the limited masking in both Photoshop and Luminar. but the theory works and works very well.
Kathy I'm not sure if your software can do this so I'm not sure if this would help you or not.

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Thanks Gordon. No, my software can’t do that. What I will try tonight - start from the beginning and do a lot more edits in the raw file with a focus on decreasing the exposure in the sky. Then export with deep prime noise reduction to Nik for the finishing touches. Lately I have been doing very little editing in the raw processor and far more in Nik because the latter is faster. I think with any photo needing denoise treatment is probably better with more edits in the raw state and then the denoise can fix anything that shows up with editing.

Kathy G said:

Thanks Gordon. No, my software can’t do that. What I will try tonight - start from the beginning and do a lot more edits in the raw file with a focus on decreasing the exposure in the sky. Then export with deep prime noise reduction to Nik for the finishing touches. Lately I have been doing very little editing in the raw processor and far more in Nik because the latter is faster. I think with any photo needing denoise treatment is probably better with more edits in the raw state and then the denoise can fix anything that shows up with editing.

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I always do the denoise first... but I'm also using Photoshop with different layers... so I make that change and I can just (command J) to create another layer with the denoise already done.

Okay, here is the revised edit. I think it is a bit between what Gordon and Yezdi have suggested.

Looks Great Kathy!

Thanks Gordon

Nice shot Kathy. Love actions of the waves.

Paul T said:

Nice shot Kathy. Love actions of the waves.

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Thank you Paul

You've done very good on that version. Definitely a lot more "WOW" factor compared to the original post.

Oztours said:

You've done very good on that version. Definitely a lot more "WOW" factor compared to the original post.

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Thanks Peter. I tend to be timid in editing in case I do too much and create something ghastly. As well, the sky didn’t look like it appears in the photo. It was a dull overcast day. It is amazing what our sensors will pick up!

Now this looks very nice....