Before & After #448

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 #449."

Game ends Thursday, 22th November, 2012 at 8:00pm GMT.

HERE is a link to a RAW file :- http://digitol.free.fr …s/2005.08.14_18​.58.25.CRW

And here is a neutral jpeg

Opened in Camera RAW - reduced blacks, increased clarity and vibrance and highlight recovery. Sharpened. Opened in CS5, duplicated BG, selected sky and multiplied. Selective colour adjustment on neutrals and increased yellows/reds. Cropped and smart sharpened. Added white and black stroke.

Phenomenon

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yb98 wrote in post #15249445
HERE is a link to a RAW file :- http://digitol.free.fr …s/2005.08.14_18​.58.25.CRW

Do you have the .thm file that goes with the CRW? Unfortunately, DxO Optics Pro won't load the CRW without it.

.thm file here

Well, here's my attempt...

Here is my attempt. I tried to bring out the streaks and colours in the sky and the dramatic clouds.

DxO has a quirk with 300D CRW files. If the raw file has been saved in Canon DPP, then DxO won't open it. DPP appends some data at the end of the raw file and DxO will only open untouched raw files. First I had to load the CRW file into a hex editor and removed the extra bytes at the end of the file. Then I ran CRWRepair.exe (freeware) to repair the raw file and finally DxO would open it.

I did some highlight recovery, lightened the shadows some and increased the saturation.

NigelD : good atmosphere and nice framing. Just a little little too dark.
MrGman65 : looks unnatural but original.
cYn : could be the best one if only this halo around the moutain could be removed.
Heycoop Photography : good details but too much yellowish.
macroimage : nice presence of the sun rays.

Thanks for paticipating to everyone.
The choice is hard. I think that the pic of cYn could win this one if there was not this halo around the moutain. So the winner is NigelD.

Thanks yb98 - I'll get another one up shortly.

Well done everyone else - I liked cYn's edit as well.

very cool

Nice job all!
yb98 thanks. i was going for the surreal... hence the title.