Dealing With Color

Sunsets and sunrises provide endless variety. The same physical location will always yield a different cloud formation, and the shades of the colors seem to change by the second.  Exposure remains difficult where there are dark aspects, whether by clouds or foreground. We also don’t want to spend time making adjustments and risk losing the best of several sequential shots.  Fortunately, we have the ability in post-processing to address this issue. The tension is between retaining the reality of the vision while bringing out the inherent color that we don’t see in the original exposure.
 
Take this example. This is the as shot image of sunset off Montego Bay, Jamaica.

There is little contrast here and the image is flat.  We can see hints of red in the lower clouds and some yellow and red on the horizon.  Compositionally, while the sand and small structure are darker, I liked the lone figure at the far right to add a sense of proportion and more meditative aspect to the image.
 
I used Lightroom to make basic adjustments to set white and black points to increase the contrast, clarity and vibrancy. More importantly, I worked the luminosity and saturation filters of the color controls. While increasing luminosity brightens an image’s color, decreasing it thickens the color, and when combined with saturation, makes more visible what is already there. You can then readjust vibrancy if it starts to look artificial. In these situations, subtlety is important, but you also want the image to pop. You also generally don’t want to make it artificial. You can work with shadow filters to bring back some of the detail in otherwise dark areas. Here is what I ended up with:

This brought out the yellows in the clouds above and to the right.  Maybe I could reduce the saturation and increase the luminosity of the orange more, and render it more subtle, but this brought out the reflection in the water.  I made very slight adjustments using split toning.  It is always good to compare the original to what you are doing as a reality check.  I used the sharpening and luminosity sliders and masking in Lightroom, and finished off with the high pass sharpening for more subtle adjustments.
 
I am a firm believer that less is more, and care always needs to be taken to not overdo it, lest you turn your “wow” picture into a cartoon.  Unless, of course, that is the effect you want.