Some cool Santa Monica images:

Santa Monica Swimmers


Image by szeke
Here are some guys swimming in the light of the Santa Monica pier.

Processing:

Imagenomic Noiseware reduction.

Photoshop:
- Blended -2, 0 manually in PS. The wheel reflection and the sky are from the -2.
- Magenta filter.
- Red and green curves to get the reds to show more.
- Overlay blending for contrast.
- Curves on the swimmers and a ttriangle leading to them.
- Sharpenning on the ferris wheel.
- Darken the sky a bit by the lights with a multiply layer.

Santa Monica Beach


Image by szeke
View of the Santa Monica beach from the pier.

Processing: Photomatix blend of -2, 0, 2 tonemapped using details enhancer. Then replace ocean and beach with 0 exposure. Several curves and contrast enhancement layers.

Santa Monica Beach


Image by szeke
View of the Santa Monica beach from the pier looking north. The waves break early and form really nice patterns.

Processing.

Tried doing an HDR using Photomatix but the moving people and moving waves don’t look nice in the Photomatix output. So, I only kept the sky from the Photomatix image.

The buildings, beach and ocean come from one raw exposure processed using Topaz (thanks Ian). Topaz has some nice local enhancement operators similar to Photomatix. Used PS to add contrast, neutralize a strong yellow/green cast on the white water, fix a flare on the sky due to a dried up drop of water on the GND filter (argh), high pass filter sharpenning (thanks Erroba).