December 2010 I held a popularity contest (poll) to decide what my best picture of 2010 should be. With 12 of the 35 votes the image of the sunset at the Australian coastline is the clear winner! Thank you all for your votes! Really appreciate it.
At the same time I get a lot of questions about the amount of Photoshop editing involved in this picture. People find it hard to believe this kind of sunset is for real. I must disappoint them (or not): this is for real!
I’ll show you in this blog post but first I want to point out that I have two important values when it comes to processing images:
- You’re creating ART; this is no photo journalism! As long as your edits make it a more beautiful picture (to your oppinion): it’s great! Go for it, get creative!
- Personally I limit my image processing to tweaking the colors, contrasts and highlights. I also occasionally crop, apply vignetting and clone dust spots. That’s how far as I would go and I solely use Adobe Lightroom for that. No advanced editing in Photoshop for me.
I never change reality by cloning, adding of removing certain elements in a picture. Some people do, and that’s just fine as long as you’re creating art: see value #1 above.
Now for this particular image, this is the final version:
Final version of the picture, after Lightroom edits.
In the field I used a tripod for longer exposures and a gradient filter to compensate the bright sky versus the ground. I also used a polarizing filter to record more intense colors, contrast and less reflection from the water.
At home the following processing steps were done in Lightroom, and as you can see these settings are very limited:
Lightroom edits
The dust removal was limited to only two very small spots in the sky:
Only two dust spots where removed in Lightroom
There was a little cloud that somehow distracts your eye from the rest and I hesitated to remove it to make the image stronger. In the end I didn’t, because of my 2nd value above. What would you do?
I hesitated to remove the little cloud left from the sun, but I didn't.
And now the original picture, straight from the camera:
The original unedited version
Now you can see this really WAS an amazing sunset and not something I created on my computer. I just recorded the situation and tweaked it a little bit.
Hope this was interesting for you! If you have any questions: leave a comment below.
