Stormy sky vs clear. On the SIU campus last week at sunset, I was struck by the oncoming storm that the sky displayed. Yes, we got snow that night. Taken with my iphone 6s. Some PS work on color enhancement. denoise. Removed jet streak and imposing top of building at the bottom. Not sure about leaving the lower right trees. Tried it without any foliage and it seemed a bit bare.
Nice diagonal and very interesting clouds. The trees are OK for me, but I wish the brightest tones weren't so blown out. Is there an HDR function on the phone? That's a problem with JPEGs, that you can't recover as much detail in lights and darks as with a raw file.
I agree with Diane. The trees in the right corner -- because of their shape as a group -- help to guide the eyes back to the left, so that's a good thing. I have two camera apps for my iPhone 5s (one I'm just now trying out) that have HDR capability and exposure compensation. The blown out area on the bottom of this image can be fixed, however. As I feared, moving the Whites Output slider in Levels reduced the brightness, there, but wasn't a good solution. This worked, however: I used the eye dropper tool to choose a light blue just above the white in the bottom of the image and filled a new layer below the image layer with it. Then, I changed the image layer blend mode to Lighter Color. Because I'd copied your image and pasted it into a new Photoshop document, there was already a white first layer. The light blue one was just above it, so I reduced its opacity until things looked good. A little masking, afterwards, with a low opacity soft brush to restore some of the non-blown wispy white clouds brings them back.
The diagonal presents a dramatic contrast between the incoming clouds and the clear sky. However I agree with Diane and Dennis that the brights are too overblown as is. Dennis seems to have a good suggestion. I do like having some trees in both corners for balance.
Dramatic sunset. I like the title as it describes the scene well. A nice contrast. The diagonal is strong. I wish the trees on the right stuck up more, or that more of them showed. Dennis' suggestion seems worth investigating.
theme: split sky over campus
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