Hi all
Well that was a bit of a shock. Adding two cloud layers just below the surface of the lake blew the render time from 4.5 hrs to 3'ish days (allowing for time while the laptop was asleep in transit)
There was supposed to be a base fog layer but the distribution was too small... you can see a bank of fog on the far parts of the lake. The cirrus layer that's supposed to look like wisps of fog rising from the lake is reasonably close to what I was after and I reckon it would look really cool when animated... except for the render time ;)
I still haven't fixed the water mask around that island...
This is looking good...
WOW :o Best Sky Ever......! Very Good :)
Thanks... actually the clouds are pretty close to default settings. The main improvement came from lightening the cloud colour (thanks Oshyan). This change was more effective than changing the cloud density on the cirrus layer which I had tried earlier but with unwanted results. I also make clouds a slight blue (the same hue as the sky, but very low saturation). Something I picked up from fixing my photographic panoramas.
Beautiful backdrop. Stunning mountains.