Blue & Gold

[Paul Marcellini]

This is my favorite type of sunset, well, tied with a storm at sunset. I love when you get the divided tones, cool on one side and a nice warm glow on the other.

I also am preparing for my first show which is taking up a ton of time, so sorry if I'm not around as much. I put up an announcement in the events forum.

Thanks for looking,
Paul

Canon 20d, 10-22@10mm f18 iso200

[John Blumenkamp]

Beautiful composition and overall image Paul. I really like the placement of the foreground rocks and grasses, and the dual tones make this really interesting.

[Robert Amoruso]

Well done Paul and a horizontal format to boot. Congrats on the show.

[Julie Kenward]

The color contrast is simply beautiful, Paul. Wonderful composition and exposure.

[chad anderson]

Another beautiful,cloudy Floridascape.

[Alan Melle]

I'd probably correct the barrel distortion of the horizon but other than that it looks great.

[Michael Pancier]

another fine work of art. good luck with the show.

[Bruce Murden]

Stunning, Paul! You'll be leading the Surises & Sunsets Forum before you know it! :) I always enjoy these works from you. I agree with you that the cold and warm contrast adds a lot to the mood of this sunset.

Now a how-to question: I can't bring this quality of light and color into my digital sunrise/sunset pics to compare at all to Velvia shots of similar light. Maybe it's my not finding the right way to process the files. Any hints for us who struggle to get better sunrise & sunset final images out of our digital captures?

[Maxis Gamez]

Lovely Paul. I would make a 24 x 30 out of this!! :)

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Paul,
Feeling OK??? .........a horizontal????.......................really nice. Another home run and good luck with the show!

[Joanna Trescott]

Spectacular. Good luck on your show!

[Bob Ettinger]

Great color and the reflections really draw the eye into the image. Good luck on the show.

[Grady Weed]

Wall hanger for sure. Great split colors and angle of view here. Take a bow on this one.

[Rafael Rodriguez Mojica]

Beautiful, also the type of sunsets I like. Did you use any filters or polarizer?

[John Hubbard]

Very nice, Paul! This is a great use of a super-wide for this expansive scene. I would level the horizon as well... Love the grasses in the foreground also!

[Paul Marcellini]

Thanks for all the comments everyone. I have had several requests on processing so I'm putting it here for everyone.

I used to use grads but haven't bought one since mine have been scratched so I manually blend. This scene used 3 shots, one for the rocks (f 18 1.7s iso 200) and most of the reflection, one for the sky (1/4 s) and one for the areas around the sun (1/13s).

In raw, I processed each to a rather bland state, I use a reverse curve a lot in the tone curve tab, a touch of fill light, 30 on the clarity, and a touch of vibrance.

I dont like to use recovery, and if i need to bring back some colors, I use the hue/sat/luminosity and drop the luminosity of that color. This is really good for bringing back reds, which adobe seems to destroy.

So with three bland conversions, I stack them and go to work manually blending them. Then it is all about rebuilding the contrast. I will use curves, pinch in levels, midtone contrast from the shadow/highlight adjustment. I even use brightness/contrast carefully and selectively and mask off areas I don't want it to affect.

Another thing is I shoot in cloudy wb most of the time. Auto white balance wants to neutralize casts, well that cast is you beautiful sunset, the last thing you want to happen. I never understood the jump by many people to always neutralize casts, but if they want dull scens, go ahead. I will adjust the white balance in raw, but cloudy is a good starting point for me. I ahve also noticed, shooting in cloudy wb is more pleasing to me than picking the cloudy wb setting in raw. Its just not the same.

a last thing I look for is color contrast. Opposite colors and warms/cools next to each other will intensify the effect of each other. So i will sometimes selectively cool shadows and warm highlights.

A last thing that helps sometimes is similar to clarity, use unsharp mask at a high radius, up to 25, and a low amount, like 25-50. Then right after doing that go to edit, fade filter, drop opacity until it looks right and change blend mode to darken. Then go to the layer you sharpened and change its blend mode to luminosity, this shoud help reduce increased noise.

On this picture I did use a polarizer to expose the rocks but I typically am very careful with it and the wideangle as it can cause uneven skies.

Hope all this made sense and helps,
Paul

[Judd Patterson]

Such a gorgeous image Paul! The contrasting color tones and give this image a very wide feel...like I'm seeing the entire sky front to back. Lovely composition as always and your processing suggestions are very helpful. Recently I've been dropping the luminosity on some colors to restore them as well...never have figured out why Adobe is so brutal to reds that I can see perfectly well in other RAW viewers.