Here is another step by step of my workflow for you all to see and critique to give me ideas, or to get some ideas of your own.
Capture was with 5D mkII on AV with a 70-200 set to 127mm. It was dark so focus was manually set to infinity, but i will admit, I think I overshot it a bit and the motorcycle was moving so fast I just had to get 'this' shot, I didn't have time to double check my focus. It is a tad soft. Camera was mounted to Benro Travel Angel, weighted down, IS on the lens turned off. Singh-Ray 3-Stop reverse GND filter was used, Cokin P size, used with holder.
Exposure was 1/30th Second at f11 at ISO 100. This was -1 EV. This Exposure was chosen because it preserved the highlights as much as was reasonable, with such a gigantic bright sun in the frame. The Red channel did clip, and the center of the sun blew out completely. I didn't want to do HDR because of the rapidly moving herd of goats and motorcycle being so important to the shot, and I had to expose those areas enough so that they would register without too much noise. To sum it up, exposure was a compromise chosen based on what I knew I could do in post.
Editing was done in Aperture 3.1
Here is the straight out of camera shot:
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First thing I always do is apply my basic editing setting. Black Point to 1 instead of 3, 25 definition, 1.15 Saturation, 1.35 Vibrancy. In this case I also maxed out recovery due to the highlights and clipping. I also did not like the blueish hue to the road due to the shade, so White Balance was warmed up a tad.
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Second thing I did was to dodge the lower portion, so that it would reduce the overall contrast of the image. The reason I did this was because I desired greater contrast and saturation in the midtones, but not degrade where the light was coming through the dust and sheep. Too keep the overall gradation of tones consistent across the entire frame, I feel it works better to reduce the entire contrast of the image then readjust levels across the range, rather than just do a touch of contrast brush or use curves on only a portion of the tonal range.
I erased the dodge adjustment from the area of the light coming through the dust itself, because that is the area I wanted to preserve after the levels adjustment.
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Now I adjusted levels across the tonal range to bring the image back to it's intended exposure. You can really start to see the emphasis this brings to the goat herd and the light and dust there.
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Then I tackled the issue of the flare. I used a color adjustment, brushed in on the flare only. I eye-droppered the flare color and decreased saturation and luminance. Then I increased the saturation of the other colors so it wouldn't appear grey. I noticed that the local white balance in the flare area was too green after just the colors adjustment, so I applied a curve to the blue channel to pull back the blues from the shadows even more to help balance it with the flare area. It is still noticeable, and I work on it a bit every day, but it is pretty close here.
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The last little detail I wanted to fix was the ring around the sun. I simply blurred the area with the blur brush, making a smooth transition form the white hot center to the yellow and orange sky.
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After that I did one last look at the image as a whole, tweaked the quarter-tone sliders in levels to balance out the color in the shadow areas, and here is the final image!
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Hope you enjoyed, feel free to give me some tips on how I might be able to improve on this. I have some more shots from this night on my FLICKR, the ones used here are in a set called "Step-by-Step 2", there is a previously done set "Step by Step" of another shot that was a bit differently done than this one. You can find my explanation of that one if you look through my post history.
