Hi and Thank you both. Just for interest this is a crop of what might be otherwise seen as a non photograph. A picture that on another day may well have been discarded. I always shoot Raw purely because thats what I did from day one using digital. I also shoot in faithful / neutral which does the least possible in camera processing and have noise reduction off. For this image in LR I cropped an area and then applied a graduated filter to the bottom half, with some colour fill, in this case blue. I saw the abstract possibilities of the image but still wished it to be recognisable as a surfer. In CS4 where I used burn and dodge as in a darkroom and a wee bit of sharpening , the image looked very different from where it began. I did ponder a while and wonder if I had over cooked it. It had a feel of something photographic made too look like maybe a water colour, which I dont enjoy. But this seemed to me at the moment at least something worth living with for a time and maybe reflect back in a while and get a better perspective of the image.
Once again for interest, here is the image which began the process.
