This is my "unedited" image. I made following edits in Lightroom only:
Chromatic Aberration Removal,
Enabled Profile Correction,
Temp Adjustment (towards yellow)
Tint Adjustment (toward magenta)
Exposure (plus)
Dehaze (minus)
Red hue adjustments (towards oranges)
Orange hue adjustment (towards yellow)
At first I hesitated with the last two adjustments, but after carefully reading contest rules (I am shooting RAW) I decided to add them, as color in result is more pleasing to me.
It's not cropped, no dust spot removed, not straightened. I also left Lightroom standard sharpening (around 40).
Happy to hear your thoughts. :)
I love the composition and the colour! Nice work.
Thanks, Mark! :) It wasn't the shot I wanted to get from this location, but this is the shot I got. I'm still quite happy with it. :)
NIce work man! Really want to see your final image :)
Thanks, Faris! To be honest it's not that much different. I used two exposures - one with f/11 for overall sharpness (which you see here) and the other with f/32 for super strong light rays. Then I blended it together and cropped to panoramic ratio. I'll post it soon to my profile, so stay tuned. :)
for me is interesting how bad photos are in this competition, i think power of fstoppers community is just in postprocess, but this one is finally something good
Thanks Marek for the kind words. I think that if you start with not so good photo then even being a master in photoshop can take only so far to become average or good. It takes really good photo, to make it great with balanced post-processing.
As for this photo - it's the type that doesn't need much processing. It's very contrasty with rather small dynamic range. Color palette is quite narrow, so the most powerful features here are composition, shapes and light. I consider this a "simple" photo. :)
Lee Morris Patrick Hall This is Arctic Henge in Iceland. ;)