UPDATE: It’s great that we’ve had so many participants in this experiment. We’ll definitely do it again, but no more submissions, please. And a huge thank you to everyone who responded!

I have added my own version at the end. This is what I did before I posted this article, and thus it has not been influenced by anything sent in by readers. I can’t say, however, that I would do it exactly the same way now, having seen some of the ideas below…

For more PhotoGP Raw Challenges, click here!

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I’m going to try something different here, just to see if you enjoy it. If so, we may do it again.

Above is an unedited raw file from Round 2 at CotA this season. Colin Edwards had just announced his retirement, so I thought we’d use a photo of him to try this out.

You can click on the image above to see it larger, and this time I have left off the watermark because I am releasing this image into the wild.

You can see that it’s too dark. There is a distracting arm in a white sleeve in the lower right corner. There are other small problems to solve in order to make this a more compelling shot.

I have already edited this file according to my own tastes for how to improve it. But before I show that result, I’d like to give you the chance to take a crack at it.

I have posted the original raw file for download by anyone who wants to play along. To download the raw file, click here.

You will need a raw image file editor, I use Adobe Lightroom. If you don’t have the ability to edit a raw file, you can still play along with any app that can edit a JPG file. The hi-res JPG file can be downloaded here.

So if you want to take a crack at this, download whichever file you can edit and get to work. Crop it, adjust contrast, brightness, saturation, shadows, highlights, white balance, add noise, remove noise, remove dust spots, do whatever you think the image needs to be as good as you can make it.

Then send the image to me and I’ll post it here along with whatever other submissions we get. I’ll also include my version, but it may not be the one any of us likes the best! Maybe someone will make different decisions that result in a better image and I’ll learn something to. That would be great! I’d love to see something that makes me say, Why didn’t I think of that?

Feel free to ask questions in the Comments below. (I ask you to register to comment in order to cut down on spam and trolls.)

If you want to try this and keep the results to yourself, that’s fine too. But I hope we’ll see a variety of approaches to processing this single file to produce different results.

Have fun!

Photograph: ©2014 by Scott Jones / PHOTO.GP – All Rights Reserved

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Here is our first, edited by Harry Lloyd, who is on Twitter and helps run the MotoPod pod cast. Thanks, Harry!