I have found that being part of a Photo Community is a valuable resource for improving both my image capturing and post processing techniques.

I have become a daily visitor and sometimes contributor to The Radiant Vista Community.

In this post, I thought I would take you through the evolution of an image from my post processing and alterations made based on suggestions by the Radiant Vista Community.

Here is the original capture of the Coquille River Lighthouse which is located in Bandon Oregon.  The lighthouse was under restoration when I captured the image.

(click images for larger view)

NOTE: I do all my RAW file processing within Adobe Lightroom.

First steps:

• Created a virtual copy of the original
• Straightened and made initial crop to get a feel for how I want to compose the image for final output. Lightroom makes it easy to move the crop around to visualize the output image. Though I usually try to capture the image close to the final composition, I sometimes allow for possible post composition.  In this case I was not sure how much of the water I wanted in the final image nor how much sky. Since the capture is 12.5 mp, cropping should not be an issue.
• Adjusted the white balance
• Use the Fill Light, Clarity and Highlight recovery tools to bring out the details of the rock out cropping, dune grass, and lighthouse texture. I sometimes find that the clarity and highlight adjustments will make the dust spots and sensor dust more pronounced as will other tonal type and sharpening adjustments. So I find myself preforming dust spot corrections through the various steps in the evolution.
  
• I then made the tonal adjustments to the dark, light and shadow areas to increase contrast.
• I also applied a Sky preset developed by Matt Kloskowski of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.

Resulting in this first take of the image which was posted to the Radiant Vista Community -

The first suggestion from the Radiant Vista Community was to add some contrast as shown here -

Once everyone had time to digest this edit, a suggestion was made about bringing more of the green out in the dune grass and a slightly more cropped towards the building -

NOTE: up to this point all edits had been done within Lightroom.

I then asked members of the community their opinion about removing distractions such as the sea gull, which can barely be seen and any other distractions. Since this is not documentary or journalistic, I was also open to making “artistic” adjustments.

Response

• remove distractions- seagull and some buildings in background
• square cropping

The removal of the distractions could not be done easily with in Lightroom 1.4. That meant a visit to Photoshop.

Here are those adjustments, along with my decision to bring some of the lighthouse out of the shadows.

Before and after comparison  of resulting image from community input -

Comments or additional critiques welcomed.