Slobodan, I've been working on this, trying to duplicate what you did, but I haven't quite been able to do it. Close, but no horseshoe. What steps did you take?
Ah, really easy!
All steps done in Lightroom:
1. Applied lens profile (not really necessary for this type of photo, but does take care of whatever distortion and chromatic aberration is there)
2. White Balance adjustment: slightly less yellow (-5), slightly less green (+5)
3. Tone adjustments: plus 0.75 exposure, a touch of Fill Light (+5), a touch more brightness (+5), and reduction in contrast (-20)
4. "Presence" adjustments: Clarity +30, Vibrance +25
5. HSL (Color) Panel adjustments: Blue Hue slightly toward magenta (+10), Blue Saturation +20; Orange and Yellow Luminance +20, Blue Luminance -10
The key changes, however, are done using graduated filters in LR, four of them to be precise:
6. First grad is covering the sky, with the middle somewhere slightly below the horizon. The adjustment values for the first grad: Exposure -0.50 (half a stop), Brightness -10, Contrast -100, Saturation +50, Clarity +20
7. Second grad covers just the top of the sky, with the middle line just below the two top clouds; value: -0.50 Exposure (half a stop less)
8. Third grad runs from left to right, with the middle approximately where the distant lake begins; value: -0.33 Exposure (a third f/stop less)
9. Fourth grad covers just the tiny patch of dry grass in the leftmost lower corner; value: -0.50 Exposure (half a stop less)
As you can see, even in the post-processing,
the hand of man is key! It moves all the adjustment sliders, after all
But even more important is the eye of man! And moderation.
P.S. It is quite possible, even very likely, that when those changes are applied to a RAW file (instead to a jpeg, as I did), they might produce a slightly different result.