Photo was taken for the DPC Circle III Challenge. Shot was taken handheld with the camera set to Aperture Priority.
In post, imported into Lightroom 2.4 and cropped to 10x10. Then exported the single image into Photomatix Pro 3.1 where I used the following settings: Strength 60, Color Saturation 85, Luminosity +5, Light Smoothing Very High, and Micro Contrast +10. The White Point was set to 0.009 and the Black Point at 0.002 with the Gamma set at 1.01. I set the temperature to +2, Saturation Highlights and Shadows at 0, and Micro Smoothing 0. Highlight Smoothing set to 8 and Shadow Smoothing/Clipping both set to 0.
Following import back into Adobe Lightroom, I made the following adjustments: Exposure +0.83, Recovery 92, Fill Light 11, Brightness + 13, Contrast +67, Clarity +81, Vibrance -17, and Saturation +25. I made slight adjustments to the Tone Curve: raising the Lights to +7 and lowering the Darks to - 10. I then made image-wide color adjustments namely Saturation (Red -44, Yellow +81, Green -13, and Blue -31) and Luminance (Yellow +71). Finally, I set the Sharpening Amount to 56 with a Radius of 1.0 and Detail set at 25.
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I think that the first thing that stands out is that I spot the car, then I spot the circle. A tighter crop , the same as you have at the top and bottom would have eliminated this and given it a different POV with interesting diamond patterns.
Your processing is spot on for this, sharp, clean cut lines, good colours. As someone else said " your invisibility cloak is working"
which is true, a lot of times it is hard not to get your reflection in these shots, so kudos for that.
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