Malice

First of all, my apologies for being so late with my reply and thank you all for the effort you put into your interpretations, which show a nice variety of ideas. 

There's no interpretation I don't like!

I like the very colorful versions (despite the "available darkness") of Red83152 and deano, which are (a.) for me personally fitting in well with the season in which this picture was taken, as it was spring time then, the most colorful time here in Germany and (b.) the direction I was always had in mind for this exposure. But the topaz-Version and (especially) Bart's black and white version introduce a nice industrial touch. Whereas both of Peter's versions turn the building more into an island of light/surrounded by darkness. Very nice.

So, thanks again.

In closing, here's the result of my own processing at the time:

Sure, why not.

I think, I can find a few more difficult exposures in my archives. 

In my option (again), not a simple exposure to work with, partly because I had trouble coming up with an idea of what I wanted to do here. I started listening to Kate Bush and watched the Wuthering Heights video over and over again. Maybe that helped a little. It sure didn't hurt. :-)

Somewhat similar to Thumper's approach, I also decided to focus more on the people in the image and less on the surrounding landscape.

My processing steps in LR4:

* Use the cloning/stamping tool to remove one person at the line, where I wanted to crop the image. Parts of her were overlapping with the person behind her, so I brushed over those parts to try to make this less obvious (which didn't work out too well, if you look closely).

* Crop with a 16x9 aspect ratio

* Apply a gradient filter from top to bottom (settings: Exposure -1.50 / Contrast +25 / Highlights -100 / Clarity +50) to bring out the structures in the clouds

* Overall exposure: -1.50

* Highlights: -25

* Shadows: +25

* White levels: +10

* Black levels: -10

From there I moved to the Nik Collection and applied the following filters:

Color Efex Pro 4:

Reflector Efex: Method "Gold" / Light intensity 50% / Light fall off 50% / Position 50% / Source direction 219°

Detail extractor: 25% / Contrast 6% / Saturation 6%

RAW Presharpener:

Adaptive sharpening: 25% at normal ISO

Convert to JPG using Apple's Preview. No downsizing necessary due to the heavy crop applied in LR.

Which led to this result:

In a (somewhat vain) attempt to create an image with the color key look, I played around a little more...

After the adjustments in LR4 listed above, I created a virtual copy of the image and added the following steps:

* Color saturation: Red +100, all other sliders at -100

* Color luminescence: Red +100

* Overall saturation: -30

Moving on the the Nik Collection:

Color Efex Pro 4:

Tonal contrast: Highlights 25% / Midtowns 50% / Shadows 25% / Saturation 20% / Contrast type standard

Detail extractor: 25% / Contrast 6% / Saturation 6%

Reflector Efex: Method "Silver" / Light intensity 50% / Light fall off 50% / Position 50% / Source direction 219°

Colorize: Method "2" / Color: using the pipette to pick up the color of the dress of the person in the foreground of the image / Strength 15%

Leading to this version:

The second one didn't really turn out the way I wanted to, but I thought I might as well share it, while I'm at it.

Thanks to Peter for sharing an interesting exposure to work with and a nice weekend for you all.

My thanks to all of you for having a go at this difficult image and providing a lot of food for thought.

Bart, congratulations on the bold move of doing away with the strong colors of the image. But your b/w version works very well and creates a strong doomsday atmosphere. The lack of color leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the viewer's brain/mind. I like that.

deano, I like your idea of pushing the reflections of the car roofs. It adds a lot to an otherwise bad composition. The image as a whole turns out much more balanced this way. But I also like the warmer touch of the antique filter.

Peter/Merco_61, I really like what you have done with the colors. The final result is a little on the border of switching into the realm of graphics or maybe a little cartoonish/comic-book like (and I mean this in a good way!).

Jerry_, apart from the strong colors, which I do like, I find the panoramic crop very well chosen, even if it ditches a lot of the clouds. But that's something you wouldn't know, if you only saw the final result. Your crop also corrects some of the image's flaws in composition. Really nice.

Which leads me to my own interpretation, which is partly fueled by the inspiration you have given me (I waited with my processing until the deadline was reached on purpose) and my own ideas, which developed along the way.

The idea behind my version is to somewhat correct the composition by cropping the image and from there move a little into the aforementioned "doomsday-direction", a bit on the surrealistic side of things. Somewhat like mixing a failed chemistry experiment into an ordinary day scene. ;-)

So, as usual I started out in LR4, with the following adjustments:

* Apply the lens correction profile (LR4 preset) 

* Tilt the image by 0.5 to the left

* Crop away a significant part of the foreground

* Increase the overall exposure by 1.10 and push the shadows by +20

* To prevent everything from going flat and turn all the blacks to grays, I strengthened the blacks by -20.

* Clarity was set to -50 and sharpening to 0 for a softer, less defined look.

* To correct the exposure in the clouds somewhat, I applied a neutral density filter from top to bottom with an exposure setting of -1.50 and added another -50 of clarity for that filter.

This image was exported as TIF and run through Dfine 2 (Nik Collection) at 200% contrast and color noise reduction. Finally, I down-sired the image with Apple's Preview.

And here's the result:

So, thanks again for all the effort you have put into this challenge and see you next time around.

If the rest of the series is anything like this, I think it would be worthwhile to finish the selection and processing.

 

Usually when I see this kind of skies, I don't have a camera with me 

A common problem, I share. This time I was fortunate enough to leave the camera in the office for a couple of days. :-) Especially in winter time, we have quite good chances for interesting skies with a lot of "nice" chemtrail touches due to the big airport here.

The series is about a dozen pictures in total. Some with only the clouds and some that are more like the one provided here. Maybe I'll get around to finish them, now that I have a few more ideas what to do with these exposures in processing.

Since I won't have time on the weekend, I had to take care of this exercise/challenge a bit earlier than usual.

When I saw the original exposure, I was immediately tempted to go into a harsh dominant technocratic steam-punk-lite direction and I like the "fire" right behind the tower.

So, as usual, I started out in LR4 (after converting the NEF to DNG), using the following adjustments:

* Set white balance to the daylight preset (5500 K)

* Apply the automatic lens correction profile

* Manually adjust the perspective by applying a "Transformation" setting of Vertical -25 (to make the tower more looming) and tilt the image by +2.0 

* Increase contrast by +25

* And to really push the fiery impression increase contrast by +25, highlights by +50 and whites by +75, while lowering the blacks to -75

I then moved to Silver Efex and applied the "Full dynamic (harsh)" filter.

To reduce the artificial transitions in the clouds a little, I then applied some noise reduction with Dfine 2 (default settings).

And here is the result:

Thanks to Jerry_ for supplying such a nice exposure to play with!

P.S.: I've read or heard somewhere (sorry, but I can't recall where) that (theoretically) making pictures of the Eiffel Tower available to the public can be problematic. Is this correct? I'm just hoping no-one can get into trouble here... 

Thanks to deano for letting us play with his image.

Which reminds me, it's been too long since I've travelled to Canada and I haven't really seen the Rockies at all.

With the bleached out vegetation on the one hand and the dark forests on the other hand, the original exposure already had a monochrome quality to me. Therefore I decided to go for black & white processing.

I started out with LR4 (after converting the NEF to DNG) with the following adjustments:

* Set white balance to the "daylight" preset (5500 K)

* Strengthen white and black levels by 25%

* Increase clarity by 10% and saturation by 25%

* Remove some dust specks in the sky (which were really hard to find in LR)

> Export as TIF

> With Silver Efex Pro I applied the "Full contrast and spectrum" filter to get some structure into the sky and bring out the details in the forested areas.

> With Analog Efex I applied a slight vignette to the corners (full circle, Amount -50, Size 33%)

> Added some more sharpening with Sharpener Pro RAW Pre-Sharpening (default settings)

> And reduced the noise a little, which was introduced by the previous steps with Dfine 2

And this is the result:

Thanks again and have a nice sunday.

These are compression artifacts. Initially I did the downsizing with "Preview". After your comment, I did the same thing with LR4 (limiting the file-size to 1 MB) and the result was the same. When I double the max. file-size to 2 MB, the resulting JPG comes out alright (see below). By the way, the preview picture in Finder still shows these artifacts even when the actual image doesn't.

Interestingly enough, it seems that the Forum software is adding another layer of compression. After the upload it tells me, the image has a size of a little under 1 MB, even though the file on my disk is 1.8 MB. The result seems to be okay, though.

My thanks to dcbear78 for providing this nice exposure.

Before coming to my results, just a quick anecdote. Working on this image, I've maneuvered myself into a very frustrating position. At one point during the processing, I got it into my head that I find the writing on the sign drawing too much attention to itself and thereby distracting from the overall impression of the image. So, I tried brushing over the sign and reduce the effect of the writing by adjusting the sharpness, contrast, etc. of only the sign. I tried stamping over the letters with 25% opacity and I experimented with a second layer in Photoshop. All of these experiments lead to very unnatural looking results, though. So, eventually I had to discard this notion and just live with what I got with the simples adjustments.

So, my processing steps in LR4 were:

* Straighten the horizon

* Apply a graduated natural density filter to reduce exposure in the sky (-1.50)

* Increased the exposure of the image as a whole by +1.50 to get the rest of the image back to its former exposure level.

* Reduce the highlights by -50 and push the shadows by +33 to balance the lighting a little more.

* Increase saturation by +25 to push the colors in the sky a little more.

* Clone out a few dust specks in the sky.

And this is the result:

And to lighten my mood a little, I played around with the filters in Color Efex Pro 4 and choose the "Monday Morning" filter to create an alternative version:

At least in this version, the impact of the sign is taken care of. ;-)

Thanks again and have a nice sunday.

Edit:

It seems that the compression/transcoding to JPG introduced some artifacts. Those stripes in the sky are not in the original.

300 mm can be enough for wildlife, if the target isn't too far away or too fast moving ;-)

This was shot with the aforementioned Tamron 70 - 300 mm VC on my D3100. I bought this lens 3 years ago and I liked it better than the Nikon equivalent of the time. From my (very limited) tests, I had the impression that it was faster in finding focus and overall image quality. So, all in all, I'm quite happy with it.

When shooting birds (and other flying wildlife), be ready to take a lot of pictures, though. I usually use the burst mode for this and just keep on shooting. After all it doesn't really cost you anything to discard 99% of the exposures afterwards.

You can get some extra reach by cropping the image in post-processing, but will of course loose resolution this way.

Sometimes (often?) it also pays off to wait:

For this image, I propped the camera on a table, focused roughly on the spot where the birds where landing all the time and triggered the camera remotely, when a bird showed up.

A very nice image, Bart, which also reminds me a lot of the region around my home town.

After using the Adobe DNG converter on the NEF file (LR4 can't handle the Df NEFs), I started processing the image.

These are my adjustments:

White Balance: 5650 K (to get a stronger blue tint to the water)

Exposure: +0.50

Contrast: +15

Shadows: +50

(to get a little more details out of the tree line in the background and the buildings hidden there)

The biggest part in LR has been removing spots in the skyline, though. I don't know, if there were some water spots on the lens or if these spots are on the sensor itself. And while I was at it, I also removed two birds, which were so small that they only covered a few pixels and appeared more like dust specks. To give an impression, these are the places where I cloned something out:

After exporting from LR (as TIFF), I moved on to Silver Efex Pro.

Two side notes: I played around with a lot of filters in Color Efex, Silver Efex and Photoshop, but many were so drastic that they basically deconstructed/destroyed the whole photograph, so I stepped away from them again. Secondly, I think the original exposure could also be processed in such a way that you end up with an abstract painting like image, with strong basic color planes and harsh shapes. But I don't know how this could be done without actually recreating the whole image, so I stepped away from that, too.

So, instead of the things mentioned above, I went into the direction of a rather neutral but detailed image, with areas where the eye can wander and (try to) draw the viewer in. To get there I applied the "Full Contrast and Structure" filter with the default settings in SEP, except for the frame I added. In my opinion the frame is helpful in this case as it reminds the viewer a little of the classic chemical development process and I hope to invoke a little of the "I just finished processing this image and are looking at it for the first time"-feeling.

To finalize the image, I used the Raw Presharpener of the Nik Collection and downsized the image for the upload.

And here's the result:

Thanks again to everybody involved and have a nice sunday.

Okay, good to know.

For this exercise I did the resizing with 'Preview' on purpose, because I wanted to treat both versions as similar as possible. I.e. export at maximum quality out of the RAW-Converter and then resize afterwards.