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.