I have darkened the water and kept the tree as it was in the RAW image, except for the denoise filter. I think it has eliminated some of the small leaf details that may look like sharpening artifacts.
I have removed the vignette that may have been causing the blotchiness mentioned by @Mark_Seaver and @Paul_Breitkreuz . The re-edit was sized to 2500 pixels on the long side, as suggested by @Diane_Miller. I also cropped a bit more mostly off the left side. I thank all of you for your suggestions.
Gorgeous!! And very believable – I have some similar sunsets from over there.
It would be easier to judge at a larger size, as there are some probably sharpening artifacts that may just be from JPEG conversion or whatever goes on in posting, so I can ignore them. At the detail I can see here the grasses look OK, but I wonder about darkening the water.
Thanks, Diane, for taking the time to reply. I was and am still bothered by the “artifacts” you mention. I went back and reprocessed the picture. The areas of the tree in the original RAW file are pretty dark. When I brought up the shadows and could see a bit of green in the leaves, it also revealed much more sky. This gave the tree a more spotty look. I used denoise initially, and it did not add any artifacts I could identify. There was still a lot of noise at the end, so I ran it through Topaz Denoise again and smoothed out all the noise. I did not use any sharpening at that point. The final edit looks clean to my eye. I am not happy with the way it looks here but I don’t know what I can do about it.
Barbara, I like the balance of the scene between the setting sun and the stork heading for home. The colors look good and it’s always a challenge to keep the sun from blowing out. The darker grass and water in the repost do “feel” right. I do see some blotchiness in the sky to the left of the tree that has me thinking you dodged this area strongly. Those blotches may arise in the conversion to jpeg. Otherwise I don’t see any significant noise in either version.
Barbara, the scene without the stork is wonderful, with the stork it is truly super. Excellent timing here overall…
No thoughts for change except the mention of the slight vignetting…
I like the darker water. Things like these sharpening artefacts are frustrating. You might try posting a larger image here to see if that helps. There would be less downsizing. Downsizing does give artifacts, but they should stay at a reasonable level. And it’s hard to know what happens behind the scenes when images are posted here.
I like to post images at about 2500 pixels on the long side, which gives anyone a chance to zoom in on it a little more than the large display size. If you are bothered by the chance of image theft, you could leave it up and notify anyone who has expressed an interest, then take it back down after a day or so.
That looks better, but you are the judge, looking at them on your computer. If the lighter areas that seem to be outlining the leaves (or somehow dwelling among them) don’t show there, they shouldn’t show in a properly prepared file for printing. If it is intended for web display or submission to a competition, it may take more sleuthing to see if the rest of it can be eliminated, as it may be coming from JPEG conversion. But I doubt anyone but a few of the pixel peepers here would notice it.
The tree and bird are such special shapes, as is the sunset, who would look beyond the beauty?
