Before and After - The Weekly Editing Challenge

Cropped to 16:9.
Levels.
Couple of grad filters.
Removed birds with healing brush.
Cloned out white building far lhs.

Ok, first I "faked" bracketed exposures in Lightroom. Then I merged them all to HDR in Photoshop. Tweaked colors a bit. Removed bird using the clone tool. Lastly, cropped. My result:

I've had a few days to consider all the submissions and, again, it was a very hard choice. In the end though, cropping to remove of some of the distracting elements and exposure adjustments that brought the structure of the bridge up kept me coming back to Benitoite's edits.

So this week's challenge goes to Benitoite. Congratulations and please submit our next challenge!

Benitoite wrote in post #17688765
RAWtherapee conversion: Distortion Correction -0.5, Vignette Correction, Grad Filter, L*a*b* Lightness 27, Chromaticity 14, Contrast 12, Black -5821, Crop, Rotate 1.5, USM, Edge Sharpening 4 iterations, NR, Highlight compression off, Tone mapping, Resize.
GIMP: cloned out birds.

Hosted photo: posted by Benitoite in
./showthread.php?p=176​88765&i=i268222885
forum: Competitions

Congrats, Benitoite!

Congrats, Benitoite!

Excellent work Benitoite.

itsallart wrote in post #17698864
Congrats, Benitoite!

vertigo235 wrote in post #17698901
Congrats, Benitoite!

rrblint wrote in post #17698903
Excellent work Benitoite.

bumpintheroad wrote in post #17698861
I've had a few days to consider all the submissions and, again, it was a very hard choice. In the end though, cropping to remove of some of the distracting elements and exposure adjustments that brought the structure of the bridge up kept me coming back to Benitoite's edits.

So this week's challenge goes to Benitoite. Congratulations and please submit our next challenge!

Thanks, thanks all for the compliments. It was a pleasure to work on the image, and it's always great to see everyone's interpretations.

Before and After - The Weekly Editing Challenge
...now compiled into a single, easy to locate thread, that can be added to your subscribe/follow list!

Rules are simple:

• Download the image file from the current week
  
  
• Contestants will have 7 days to edit the image and post their edited version to the thread (1 entry per week)
  
  
• The owner of the original image will choose a winner
  
  
• The winner will copy & paste this post and include a new downloadable image link

  The new image must be unedited / SOOC (straight our of camera), full-resolution, and in a RAW format, ie. CR2, DNG, TIF, etc
  (Dropbox works well for uploading and linking these large files)

Once again, cropping heavily to find a proportionate composition. Sunsets by themselves are hard; anxious to see what other come up with.

Here's my effort this week. All Lightroom jiggery pokery.

Here is my version. I applied some selective color adjustments, cropped and really wanted to highlight the reds at the bottom of the clouds the mid-tones with their lovely golden and magenta hues. Enhanced the foreground to add extra depth. High pass filter to finish it off..

Here is my version...

Cropped to portrait

So is this taking the edit too far?

heck, no! I think you took it to a new level!