I drove past this area earlier in the day, then came back specifically to get this photo. This is looking down a dock just off of Olin Turville Park in Madison, WI (you can see the capital in the upper right hand corner).
The day was really crappy (blank grey sky, tons of humidity, and a lot of haze in the air. Thus, the photo looked pretty flat, so I gave it some life with HDR (which I'm sure some people won't care for, but I can post the original after the challenge is over).
Processing:
In RAW, I increased sharpness and contrast. I also increased shadow detail, decreased highlights, and slightly increased color saturation. Then I exported -2, 0, and +2 copies of the image.
I then used the free tool HDRtist, with the slider about 1/3 about the third notch. On the image exported from that, I adjusted levels (brought in both white and black), hue/saturation to bring out more of the warm colors, and did a color balance to give the greens a bit more pop. After resizing, I did a couple unsharp masks (2 iterations with a large radius, one with a small radius). Finally, I applied some selective Gaussian blur to the shy to remove some color banding in the clouds caused by HDRtist.
My outtake for this challenge:
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I like this. I think that the buildings make the centre of the picture confusing. I suggest you ask for them to be demolished in the interests of aesthetics. Or how about cloning them out and seeing how it looks then.
Lovely pier, but you've overdone it on the processing. The pier has a heavy glow on both sides, particularly the left, and the leaves in the upper corner do as well, although that's partly the sun's fault. The solid blue of the sail (?) looks out of place; not sure if you did anything to that, but with Advanced Editing rules...
You've sort of emphasized everything except the boats.
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