One of the post-production questions I'm often asked is "how do you know when to stop?", and there isn't an easy answer, at least not when you're relatively inexperienced. For example, when I first started blogging – back in the days when I was posting an image a day – I used to stop working on an image when I ran out of time. At that point I might not have created the best possible image or version, but I stopped and posted it anyway.

These days I can normally work my way through an image and end up with a version that I'm a) happy with, and b) fairly confident is better than the alternatives. On this occasion though I've worked through a whole range of alternatives, all of which I've liked, but none of which have really stood out as being noticeably superior to the others.

So, as an alternative to spending a good part of today reprocessing this one yet again, here's the 'cold' version. There was a black and white version (which I discarded because my previous shot of the same scene was in black and white), a warmer version (which didn't really fit with the overall mood I was trying to create), and a Lab Color version (which I couldn't get quite right), any of which you might have preferred, but it's Sunday and I'll probably end up in trouble with the 'powers that be' if I spend any more time working on this one rather than "doing something useful" ;-)

captured camera lens aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

5.31pm on 15/4/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 35mm f/1.4L USM f/1.4 1/250 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 2x1