Minor Burning / Dodging / Color Correction in Lightroom

[davidI]

I'm interested in entering a photo from my Antarctic trip in the Nat Geo Travel Photograph Competition. http://travel.nationalgeographic.com...ear-2017/rules

The rules state:

Only minor burning, dodging and/or color correction is acceptable, as is minor cropping. High dynamic range images (HDR) and stitched panoramas are acceptable. Any changes to the original photograph not itemized here or in the Guidelines are unacceptable and will render the Submission ineligible for a prize.

My question is - what tools in Lightroom can be considered to fit within these purposes.

I understand no spot removal is allowed which sucks since I have lens spots all over my photo but I'll do my best to use the Adjustment brush to clean those up.

My questions are:

Are tone curves considered burning and dodging?
What about adjusting highlights / shadows / whites / blacks. Since they say HDR is acceptable I would assume so.

What about clarity and vibrance? Are those considered 'color correction' tools?

I assume I have to do without saturation, noise reduction, profile corrections, chromatic aberration, and vignetting in post?

What about adjusting the Blue Primary in Camera Calibration? Is that considered minor color adjustment?

I don't want to 'overdo it' but the photo really pops and reflects its natural beauty with a little post-processing!

[Mitsu3000gt]

If you can make a HDR with no conditions attached to that, that pretty much means you can do anything haha. Sounds like they just don't want you adding things, swapping skies, cloning stuff out, etc.

How would they know anyway? Do you have to submit the RAW file along with it?

Tone curves are not burning/dodging.

If HDR is acceptable, that basically gives you free reign on brightness/contrast/exposure/tone curves/highlights/shadows/saturation adjustments, both global and localized.

Minor color adjustment probably means you can correct color, but they probably don't want you changing an orange sunset to pink or something.

Basic processing for most people is a tone curve or black point adjustment, WB correction, color correction, exposure correction, and shadows/highlight adjustment. I'd be surprised if you weren't able to do that much. Even just shooting an out of camera JPEG, the camera is already doing more than that to the image for you.

[davidI]

^If you win you have to submit a RAW.

Apparently back in 2012 a guy lost because he'd cloned out a shopping bag in the photo.

https://www.slrlounge.com/how-photos...aphic-contest/

That sucks for me as there is a stray bird wing and lots of lens spots that I would absolutely love to clone out but will need to spend time trying to burn / dodge out with the adjustment tool.