2 Pro Lake Stevens Sunset 1/12/22

[Jim D]

My wife called me up from the basement last night to see the sunset that was starting. I barely had time to get the drone out and up to capture this.


Skyline L-R: Cascades, Mt. Rainier, Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound

 

[Squidinc]

That’s a beauty!

 

[Dale D]

My wife called me up from the basement last night to see the sunset that was starting. I barely had time to get the drone out and up to capture this.

View attachment 141906
Skyline L-R: Cascades, Mt. Rainier, Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound

It's a beautiful shot! As I write, every time I see one of these high dynamic range challenges, you can greatly improve the foreground using Adobe's new masking, which allows me to mask and edit any selected area of the image. In this case, I selected the foreground first and edited it using increase in the shadows and exposure. Then I opened an editing brush and adjusted the brush size and painted the intermediate picture, and used shadow slider and exposure slider to open dark ares. Here is the original and edited versions. I did not touch the sky.

My point being, all of these sunset and sunrise HDR (high dynamic range) images have an under-exposed foreground that can be improved in post.

Dale
Miami

 

[Jim D]

Dale, I appreciate the advice and I agree with you on the fantastic new masks in PS. As a matter of fact I used an inverse sky replacement with some shadow recovery to work this picture. I find your treatment to be much too strong resulting in an HDR look, that isn't close to reality.

 

[Dale D]

Dale, I appreciate the advice and I agree with you on the fantastic new masks in PS. As a matter of fact I used an inverse sky replacement with some shadow recovery to work this picture. I find your treatment to be much too strong resulting in an HDR look, that isn't close to reality.

You are probably right about the overdone comic book look of HDR, but I was trying to prove the point that sunsets and sunrises are all associated with under-exposed foregrounds that should be correctable. The inverted sky replacement is a great idea too! I'll try that on my next one.

Dale