Upping the colour and impact of a Jason Polokow image in Lightroom

Shooting in all conditions sometimes means that you images can lack impact - even when the composition is excellent.
Some action cameras can be set to low contrast for shooting in high contrast conditions - this preserves highlights but looks dull on screen. However, this makes sense for editors because we need long tonal scales to manipulate the final image 'look'.  If you shoot jpegs or mpegs they can be pretty difficult to work with if you've lost the highlights or crushed the shadows - so a long tonal scale, low contrast image is what most editors want to start with.
These low contrast images are easily manipulated in most programmes - from Photoshop down to the most basic - to give much more impact on your screen. Try Picasa for nothing and it will do the job well.

Here are a couple of Jason Polokow shots I picked from his website, looking like they needed a boost. You'll notice the Flymount on his mast!

Incidentally, always make sure your images are RGB, not CMYK, and in sRGB for web use or they will look dull. For press use, use Adobe RGB or CMYK to get the full tonal range for the printer to work with.

Here's the 'before' shot of Jason - great image but, to my mind, lacking some bite

and this is after raising the saturation levels a little, using the 'Vibrance' slider and adding a soft edged dark filter from the sky downwards and from the bottom up to concentrate the eye on the action. There is a photographic term - 'vignetting' - that describes the way we prefer the corners of an image to be darker to stop the eye wandering out of the frame. In this case we see the eye being led to the action while being immersed in the breaking wave, nice aesthetics.

I've done the same thing here, bringing the eye to the centre of the action by darkening the edges and then upping the saturation and vibrance.

This is the before manipulation shot

and this is the 'after' in which I've done both darkening at the top and some at the bottom right, emphasising the green reflecting from Jason's sail. I've lightened his shoulders with a soft brush and filled the shadows to lighten the whole tonal quality. then a bit of 'vibrance' and saturation.