Last Light of the Day

I believe I’ve posted this as a B&W but curiosity got the best of me to see if using the TK8 masks and a sharpening technique I learned about on here using a gaussian blur-sharpen, I could get more out of the color.

This is the very last shot of light quite a bit after the sun slipped quietly beneath the waves, so while there was some fairly decent light in the sky, not so much drama.

Specific Feedback Requested

Does the sharpening work? Is there too much drama in the sky? I like angry skies so I do tend toward a bit more drama than others might prefer but I tend to sell more of those than the nice, quiet bucolic scenes.

Technical Details

Is this a composite: No
Technically, this is not a composite but it is in the sense that I combined several different PP plugins to get the effect I wanted.

D850, Tokina 17-35, f/22, ISO 31, 1.6 sec +.67 EV

Processing was fun…well, it was an adventure anyway. I wanted more drama in the sky, so I used a modified darks 2 to make a mask of the tree line and the water areas. I used the mask inverted to isolate the sky and used NIK’s SEP 2 to add a red filter, increase the strength, lower the brights but increase the mids. then changed the blend mode to Luminosity and lowered the opacity. Again, using the darks mask I saved, I added some color and B/C layers to my tastes. Lastly, I used the select by color range to get the brightest part of the high cloud and ton e it down by painting in a 12% value of the lightest bright, not white part of the cloud.

I used John Williams blurring to sharpen technique which I find interestingly enough to use on other images.

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What a great feeling gives your image . And ,a yes for that drama as you call it in the sky. It is certainly not too sharp. This image needs that to express the waiting for the storm to come I think.

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Wow. This is amazing. It’s like a painting, nineteenth century. A really fine image. I would darken that white cloud on the right to the level of the one on the far left. It’s really the only thing that keeps this from being a perfect image imo.

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I see your point and was almost there. It’s a tough call because in my mind it completed the accentuation of a fading sky without overpowering the main cloud formation…and Bierstadt is my painting hero.

Wow, it is very Bierstadt-like. I’m with Igor on darkening the right-hand cloud. It’s size + brightness does overwhelm the center cloud to my eye. It also has that straight edge on the bottom which is visually striking in the frame, giving that area more visual weight than it needs.

Maybe at some point but this was nearly an hour long edit and I would have to redo the entire image to get that cloud lighter…thanks though for the input.

Beautiful image. I would also agree with darkening the right cloud, making the middle one even more the star of the show. Great impact image.

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This a very dramatic sky,
Nice color too,

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