sunset colors

starky987

This was one of my first attempts to capture the colors of a sunset. I realize I missed the actual sun but I was wondering if I could get some help with the colors. I notice that the orange of the sunset shows more dramatically along the top of the trees. The very tops of the trees, almost exactly where the trees meet the sky. It's strange looking to me. Any help would be great.

aperature - f/9
Shutter - 1/400
ISO - 400
Focal - 105

Not sure if its b/c of my settings or what.

jonh68

I think it's great looking. You have contrasting colors with the bluish white snow. Anytime you can get orange, yellow, and blue in the same picture like that, it's great. I would experiment with saturating it more to see if you can draw out the colors more. What you captured is nature. It's going to be orange and fade further out. That's what you want. The best pictures are those few moments that the orange fades into a blue sky just before it goes black. You have to use a wide angle for that and it helps to have something in the foreground.



Also, sunsets don't have to involve the sun. The more interesting colors happen AFTER the sun sets. There are tons of sunset pictures, but fewer after sunset. I live in a scenic place on a bay where there are spectacular sunsets. There will be several people there taking pictures but leave after the sun is gone. They miss the orange, yellow, red, blue skies, not to mention the pier lights coming on as the light fades.

Same night, different zoom.

starky987

Thanks for the nice comments, but the orange above the trees I was talking about is mostly visible when you zoom in and it creates an effect similar to if you took an orange highlighter and traced a thin line along the top of the trees. I wasn't sure if it was possible to get rid of that.

I love your second picture, the clouds are amazing!

jfriend

starky987 wrote:

This was one of my first attempts to capture the colors of a sunset. I realize I missed the actual sun but I was wondering if I could get some help with the colors. I notice that the orange of the sunset shows more dramatically along the top of the trees. The very tops of the trees, almost exactly where the trees meet the sky. It's strange looking to me. Any help would be great.

aperature - f/9
Shutter - 1/400
ISO - 400
Focal - 105

Not sure if its b/c of my settings or what.

I can think of several possible causes of the orange halo at the boundary between sky and trees (it's easy to see at 100% view):

1. Chromatic abberation from your lens. Many lenses show small color defects at a sharp boundary between light and dark things in the photo. This can be somewhat lessened in post processing, though that works better on RAW files than JPEG files.
2. A halo caused by posts processing you did to lighten up the foreground. Post processing functions such as shadow/highlights can often create a halo at the boundary between light and dark items. This is because they must internally create a mask to limit their effect to only the dark areas or only the light areas and they try to blend that mask in so that you don't get a sharp line. This blending can lead to a halo effect.
3. Slight out of focus or lens blur on the horizon. To me, the foreground looks sharper than the trees, making me wonder if something caused some blur on the tree line. The blur would let some of the orange sky mix with the black from the trees.

If you have the original file, untouched by any postprocessing, we can do a better job figuring out what caused it.

starky987

not sure if this is the same original, but its an original of the same sunset.

jfriend

starky987 wrote:

not sure if this is the same original, but its an original of the same sunset.

So, it looks like you did substantially lighten the foreground and increase the saturation of the sky. For us to help you further, you'll have to tell us what post processing steps you did on the original. The original looks like it might have a little CA, but most of the orange highlighter effect you are asking about got magnified in post processing so that's where you need to look.