You could also try some channel mixer b/w for the first one. It looks like a good candidate for some testing
Maybe also for the first one, crop around 1/5-1/6th from the top (the sky is not so interesting, the ground is much more) and some from the left to move the pathway more off from center. This might work better compositionally.
Yeah... about pictures with sky and ground:
Usually, one of them is clearly not interesting so try to frame your picture while shooting so that you fill at least 2/3's of your frame with the interesting stuff.
In this one, the sky was clearly more interesting, and the shrine on the bottom is on travel albums of 10M people... the sky is NOT that interesting, but the other choice was even worse
