I've found an approach if you use NIK's SEP2 that works quite nicely.
Once I do my normal tonal adjustments in ACR, I open it into PS and make a B&W Conversion Layer Adjustment so I can place my colors where I want. In this sample, I wanted more detail in the palmettos and less emphasis on the left side tree, allowing the fog to work to my advantage instead of fighting it. Once I had the colors where I wanted (Demo 1), I flattened the image, saved and reopened the orginal ACR adjusted file in PS and brought that file into SEP2 where I only made a Full Dynamic Harsh adjustment with the yellow filter to give a tad more emphasis on the highlights in the palmettos (Demo 2). Lastly, I did one more new SEP with only the Neutral setting but pulling the structure down to -100 and adding a slight bump on the contrast.
Flattening the last setting, I copied that file and placed it atop the first demo file, added a layer mask using three brushes starting at 33, 66, 100% progressively working from left to right (at 100%) to feather in the details where I wanted them strong, an leaving the "fog" to drift the BG out. Atop this I added the first file and again using progressive brushes on a layer mask, I blended in the harder details where they were important and blended out the rest as I felt the scene called for. I did adjust the brushes more than the 33-100 at times as needed.
The advantage to this method is that the whole edit (demo 3) only took 20 minutes.