Before & After #442

The game will last 7 Days and whoever can produce the best edited image (as judged by me) will be picked and it'll be their turn to post their unedited picture for all of us to take a crack at.

The participants must have their "Image Editing OK" turned on and they must provide at least a simple breakdown of how they edited the image, some entrants are a little vague on this point, please give us all details so we can learn and share tips. For instance if you use the unsharp mask tool or Smart Sharpen, provide us with the adjustments you used so others can try them out.

You can post multiple images, but the first image you post will be the one that is judged - all other images will be considered for knowledge and tip use only.
Feel free to comment and/or ask questions at any time. This is a good competition for learning new methods, so let's make it a bit more dynamic. I will be judging edits, not comments. Feel free to comment on the original image as well.

If you happen to be the winner of the game please start the next one with the title of the game and the following number. For example…the next game should read "Before & After #443."

Game ends Monday, 1st October at 9pm CST.

Have fun.

Here is a link to a RAW file to play with :

http://www.mediafire.c​om/?1pzbp80w8t4im4j

You win. It looks great!

First time doing one of these. Here's my attempt.

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

Heres my attempt, bonus points for guessing what program was used to process...

did the edit in LR but having problem exporting to jpeg, some memory usage problem so this is just a screen capture of image in LR.
I first recovered highlights, added fill light and about +25 black to bring out the shadows in between the rocks.
pushed contrast and clarity to the limits, added vibrance just a bit then went into HSL and adjusted to individual color saturations, hues, and luminosity with special attention to the blues and magenta and purples.
next went to curves and adjusted the highlights down, lights up, the shadows down a bit and darks down a bit.
then had to go back to add more fill light as it was getting too dark.
then went to half tones and added redish pink highlight tones and bluish shadow tones
then went to tinting and push to magenta a little, went to primary RGB hue and sats at bottom of LR panel and tweaked the red hues to bring out sky and adjust sats, and did the same with the blue to bring out the rocks and water.

I probably could dial back the saturation some but I like intense colors.

Maybe a little dark but liked the mood it gave off

eastcoastsponger wrote in post #15047084

Opened in ACR adjusted the horizon, added a dark gradient to find dust spots and removed them, adjusted recovery to about 70%, adjusted the cool/warm slider to the warmer side a touch and then opened in CS5. There I adjusted the midtones in the levels, added a NDG filter layer from the Niksoftware suite as well as a warm filter gradient layer for the sky that I brought down to the horizon. I pumped up the contrast a little maybe 10%. I added a noise reduction layer for the sky. Also, I added a soft light layer. Resized and unsharpe mask at 0.9/13%

nice job, I like it!

Ok...first of all, Beautiful shot MNUplander!

So here goes my version...figured I'd try something totally off the wall...Calling my version "Fire and Ice". Decided to make it look like lava coming up from below the waters surface. Started with Adding a layer/converted to bw...and then a yellow tint. Did the same with a red tinted layer...and painted in the lava look...then created some layers with hue/saturation changes to paint in some changes to the sky. Did an overlay...high pass filter to sharpen the image. Then touch up with cloning a few spots that I couldn't get right in each layer...

^^^ impressive as well, nice job

Converted to Black and White and burned in the clouds a little. Added mat and frame. Did a minor contrast boost. I only have CS2

Nice work so far everyone - keep up the good work, the final days are approaching!

CCCC - your image is very similar to what I came up with when I edited the image earlier this year. In fact, I thought it WAS my image until I noticed a wave that I added from another image in the series wasn't there. http://www.northerncap​tures.com …H#!i=1671800476​&k=c2TXhhH

jdaly wrote in post #15052223

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

Used an Aperture plugin and gave it an old style look. Great photo to start with!

John, Beautiful rendition...love what you did here...wished I would have done it!! GREAT WORK...you're a true artist.