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Sunset Impression I-III Post-Processing

In the previous post I described how I captured the images in the Sunset Impression series. In this post I'll describe the post processing steps that I performed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 to complete on of the images. Another common guideline for digital photography is to...

Expose to the right.

This basically means expose the image as brightly as you can without blowing out important areas of detail in your image. The image below is exposed in this fashion (see the overlaid histogram) and while it captures the basic essence of the scene it is much brighter than how I envisioned it.

Sunset Impression I - raw

The first step in post processing this image is to darken the image. This is most easily accomplished using the 'Blacks' slider in the Basic panel of the Lightroom Develop module. Essentially I slide the slider to the left until the image looks the way I want it to. This step can be seen in the next image.

Adjusting the 'Blacks' in the Basic panel of the Develop module in Lightroom 4 darkens the image.

Now the image contains information from the very dark end to the very light end of the histogram.

The next step was to enhance the 'coolness' of the water and the 'warmness' of the sunset. This was accomplished with the use of custom RGB point curves in the Tone Curve panel of the Lightroom 4 Develop module. This can be seen in the next image.

And there you have the final image!

Sunset Impression I

I hope you enjoyed these images and learned a bit about how to make them yourself. The final post-processing steps are not complicated and could be completed in Adobe Photoshop,  Adobe Photoshop Elements, Apple Aperture and probably even in iPhoto.

Please let me know how you liked the tutorial and if you'd like to see and read more like it in the future by leaving a comment in the comment box below.

Sunset Impression III

Sunset Impressions III

In the last post I explained how the use of a slow shutter speed of 0.8s, while not normally one I'd call a 'long exposure', in combination with the focal length 280mm used for these shots allowed me to create a blurred image.

To finish the description of the shooting technique I only need to describe how I positioned and moved the camera.

When using this technique I sometimes use a carefully leveled tripod to keep the horizon line perfectly level throughout the movement. These particular images were more organic in that they were captured handheld.

I usually practice the movement one or two times and then repeat it for the actual exposure. For these images I panned the camera from left-to-right through an arc of about 120° and tripped the shutter through the middle of the motion. In addition, for the image featured in this post, the third in the series, I held the camera at an angle so that the horizon line crossed diagonally across the viewfinder and I rotated the camera slightly during the panning motion.

Often more than one exposure is needed to obtain the effect I'm looking for and striving for a particular look often leads to many happy accidents.

The last step of creating these images, post-production, is completed in the digital darkroom and will be described in an upcoming post.