I shot many many shots looking for something impactful for the speed challenge. We were out all afternoon in my brother-in-laws boat and he was gunning it all day, so we were tossed around. It was hard to get a solid shot of the sailboats, the light houses, much of anything, but I did have a couple of shots that were okay - here is one. I was pretty pleased with the unedited thumbnail but the optical starburst is a little strange and was somewhat disappointed with the larger image. I did some color adjustment to give it a lot more punch - probably way overdone! I am thinking that the strange sun will get shot down and could end up making the photo take a dive on score, so I cropped it so I wouldn't have to worry about it. Likely score - 5.5.
Shot in Raw
Opened with CS2
Increased saturation on blues, adjusted curves, exposure, and sharpness. Save
Opened in elements
Noise ninja to smooth sky and increase contrast
Adjusted Hue/Saturation - decreased magenta hue
Added duplicate layer, burned out cyan and magenta lense artifacts around sun
Cropped - ended up cropping out the sun all together
Cloned to remove a couple of lens reflections in sky and some sensor dust
Save for web
Opened and added border
USM at large radius
USM at small radius
Dodge in clouds to increase contrast
Save for web
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