OK. The following observations are inherently subjective and represent nothing but my personal opinions. But for the purpose of clarity I have paid some attention to the fact that the original image was reasonably high resolution (K3), quite sharp although shot handheld, and exposed to slightly protect the highlights. As might be expected with such a 'busy' image (so many buildings and reasonable resolution) the nature of the crop applied was very varied and gave rise to interesting and varied results. The fine detail in the buildings presents a challenge regarding the use of 'clarity' and 'sharpening' and the nature of that challenge varies with the crop applied. I have tried to consider all of these points in coming to my decision.
So without further ado the winner this week is:
TODD - with his first entry that rearranged the City of Bath in a most entertaining way whilst retaining good sharpness and colour balance. Whilst not unique in the later two elements he certainly went the extra mile in post processing terms. I am not sure what Bath Council would have to say about the rearrangements but that is beside the point.
Runner up (for the second week in a row!):
Mtux - I really like the crop (the isolation of the Abbey and Church) minimal sharpening whilst retaining maximum detail. The Abbey was where the focus was centered in the first place and the softening of detail further up the hill serves to draw attention to the principal features. One note though - the levels of colour saturation are a bit high for my tastes. This is the UK in October you know
Third Place:
Neolite - Whilst cutting out the image's star performer (the Abbey) the crop is very well balanced. I like the ratios between foreground detail, mid range and skyline/sky. The resulting composition is relaxing to view. The treatment in terms of colur manipulation and sharpening has been minimal. This is something that many K3 users have found to be a good thing when it comes to post processing as it produces 'natural' looking results. For a first attempt at post processing it really is very good; keep up, the good work
I intend to provide more feedback on all the other entries, but I am short on time just now and will do so over the course of this week. I hope that's OK with everyone.
---------- Post added 19-10-14 at 18:58 ----------
Congratulations to TODD. If you need a place to store full size files for the next challenge, we have a site available at Mediafire.
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Information for the next host:
The MediaFire website is: mediafire.com
The log in name is: pentaxchallenge @ yahoo.com
The password is: postprocessing
If you could copy and paste the above information into your challenge, it would be helpful for the next winner.