#13 from Glen Coombs. It looks like he has lightened the shadows and brought up a bit of Hiro’s face behind the visor. I think Kristian did as well with the first example, though I didn’t notice it at the time.

#14 is from Jared Earle.

#15 is mine, processed before I posted this Raw Challenge.

I’m not one to say to other photographers, You should’ve done this, or You shouldn’t have done that! You don’t spend time making images in order to please ME, after all. So crop, rotate, saturate or de-saturate, burn or dodge, vignette or don’t, it doesn’t matter to me. If those edits, or others, produce the image the way you want it to look, good on ya.

I may not like it, but again, so what? I make my images look the way I want, and so should you. That’s the only thing I’ll tell you that you SHOULD do. 😉

But these Raw Challenges are intended as a fun way to learn and experiment. So I will add a few observations, and I hope some of you will respond with comments of your own.

You may notice that I cropped tighter than any of the other participants in this Challenge. The raw file I donated to this activity is from a Nikon D3X, and thus is a hefty 6048 pixels wide. That means that you can crop a lot out of the original image and still have lots of data and detail to work with. Not that you MUST crop a lot when your original image has this resolution, merely than you can exploit this if doing so will allow you to get the shot you want and retain enough detail. My cropped version is 3340 pixels wide, plenty for print.

One thing I wish I’d done, now that I’ve seen the other contributions, is lighten the shadows around the rider’s visor. A couple of you did that and I think that was a good call. Bringing up shadows globally also brought out some detail in the radiator, which is nice.

So thanks to everyone who participated this time, and we’ll do another one before too long.

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