How to post process this picture?

[Sheiky]

I like yours alot, Jan! Mine is too over-the-top ..."interesting" as patham put to say the least! I guess I shouldn't edit photos as soon as I open my eyes in the morning ..LOL!

Lol that's just the thing I like about your edit Denise. It's fearless! Now I know when I should do edits that I'd like a little more artistic

Wow, these are all great. I'll have to take a while to look through all of them.

If you had the RAW file still, I would think that only changing the white-balance and perhaps adjusting the curves a little would have made a major impact on your shot.

[patham]

Denise indeed yours are quite bold edits. While it's certainly not the way I would have went, as I don't like my pictures being that "flashy", it does bring out detail that was hiding in the original image.

Jan & Damian your two edits are quite similar. The white thing under the log is actually the road leading up to the parking lot I was standing in between two cars while I did my best to eliminate everything very obviously man-made from the shot. Of your two edits, I think I prefer Damian's version a slight bit, because for me Jan's is a bit too saturated, but that's just my personal preference and both are great edits.

Steve, the black & white really does add a lot to the image, seems there is some quite dramatic lighting in that blown out sky after all.

M_Six, it feels to me that while there has been a lot of detail brought out in the sky, the top left part looks a bit weird, sort of like a painting (I know there's a word for what I mean, but for the life of me I can't remember it...).

Thank you all for your edits and especially the explanations, I've already learned a lot!

[Sheiky]

No problem Patrick, glad we all could help out. It's also nice to see how many different approaches people have to editing a photo. Contrast, saturation, B&W, cropping, you name them...they are all very much affected by personal preference which is a nice thing

[ddt0725]

To bring out detail in a color photo, I use NIK Viveza 2. The same can be done on B&W in NIK Silver Efex using the structure slider in both programs. Which, I'm sure is what Steve did in his B&W above. My mistake on this one was slipping it into PhotoTools afterwards.

None the less, this is really a nice capture ...I like it alot!

[Joel Eade]

I removed the wooden object, cropped some off the top, used a quick mask to isolate the sky and ran a gaussian blur on it. On the foreground I placed a low opacity color gradient to warm the colors using Color Efex Pro, then sharpened the whole image with Topaz InFocus

[dsiegel5151]

I played around with the image a little bit. I thought that the image lacked a little "pop" and "emotion". What do you think?

[conropl]

I played around with the image a little bit. I thought that the image lacked a little "pop" and "emotion". What do you think?

The best one yet. If it was not a bull, I'd say that was a real cowboy.

[Steve U]

I played around with the image a little bit. I thought that the image lacked a little "pop" and "emotion". What do you think?

Very artistic, you could get a job in a tattoo shop for sure, doing horsies, cowboys and tigers.

[patham]

I played around with the image a little bit. I thought that the image lacked a little "pop" and "emotion". What do you think?

I like it!

I now also have my coworkers wondering why I just had a chuckle to myself...

[Sheiky]

It definitely has more pop now and I get emotional hihi