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This the original (well NEFF -> TIFF -> JPG) from my Nugget Point attempt in this post:
http://www.dslrusers.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=34229

Gary suggested I post the original for others to have a go at. Feel free.
I liked the strong drop off to the left in the original that give a sense of isolation and height, but I didn't like the fact that this put the lighthouse in the centre of the image. I also didn't want to lose the stacks on the right as these are what give Nugget point its identity.
I also liked the echo of the Lighthouse shape in the stacks.

This is the original image, resized here but click to follow it to the original size. (Converted to JPG, but otherwise untouched)

I thought i'd give it a quick go, because i've got a few minutes to spare:

Thanks for that Phoenix.
The crop is quite similar to the one I ended up with. I'm not entirely happy with it as we lose the isolation and height given by that long slope to the water.
You have brought the colour up a lot more though. I like it

Any more ideas?

ok, i'll play ...

i cropped to remove the blurry bottom bits but left the trail to give it a place to come from and cropped to the edge of the hill and water to try and keep the idea that there is more of the same still to go.
i cropped to get rid of the right hill but keep the little mounds
then i masked the lighthouse to retain the detail and increased the contrast on the rest
finally i took a 50 yellow out and added 20 black in selective colour on the blue channel to try and minimise the haze.

i did it on the small pic just to give you the idea of what i did.

With this image it's hard to keep both the long slope down towards the water on the left and the area in the upper right. We can crop it either way, but keeping both is hard because of the OOF plants in the foreground.

If this was my photo my solution would be to simply move the camera to a higher position and re-take the shot. Ok, so I might be stretching the definition of "simply", but that's where the use of a decent-height tripod comes in (before I got a good tripod I lost lots of shots due to problems like this) as well as climbing any available supports (cars, seats, fences, etc). Of course, you need to be careful you're not damaging the supports...

However, if this image was being used where the lower right could be obscured (e.g. with a text overlay in a magazine) it could still work. But finding applications like that is hard!

(Been away from a phone line for a few days)

Thanks Dave and Shane.
Shane: I like your crop, but don't understand the PP you applied can you be a bit verbose (I have CS2)

Dave, Choice of viewpoint was quite limited. Terrain was steep and from my camera viewpoint hemmed in by trees - a slight shift would have been impossible. Also, to "simply" go back and retake involves about 4,000km and passports. I'd love to though.

Sorry for the delay... I had forgotten that I started editing this image... I found it difficult to recover the detail from the lighthouse which was a pity... Maybe more work can be done on the original.



Thanks