Landscape help

[terrig]

Here I go again...obviously I set my focus on the sunset....I see the horizon where the trees are is very dark. Do I need to try lightening that area??? Please advise

[Digital]

Terri: whether you want to lighten the trees in post processing is your call. In this type of shot you would normally expect to get your subject exposed properly while the darker areas would tend to be underexposed. Your camera meter's dynamic range is limited more than what our eyes see.
In this situation you have a high contrast situation between the light areas, and the dark areas of your photo.
If you do try to lighten the trees you may introduce noise.

Bruce

[tbob]

My personal preference is to allow the silhouette to remain absolutely black. Trying to pull out out any colour or detail in post processing will lead to nasty grainy, noisy muck that is of no value to the image.

With these two images I would brighten the sky and water to emphasize the brilliant orange. I am no good at processing others images, hopefully someone can help you with these.

[JPS]

Hi Terri,
I would level the water a bit first and agree keeping the bank in silhouette normally works for me.
However it's your choice.
As a further point for on going conversation here's roughly what it would look like if you used PP to make the changes.
Thanks for sharing.
John

[Tony M]

Hi Terri,

John's PP is what I'd do too. To me, the main subject is the colour of the sky and its reflection on the water; the landmass serves to delimit these two and is perfect in silhouette.

I'd like to see the same done for #1. Its pier could also be an interesting subject of other photos. I hope you can go back and take more photos of it.

Tony

[chauncey]

Another way to go would be to reduce the height of the tree line about 40% then move the tree line and the sky down to where the tree reflection begins to show in the water.

[rawill]

Well I like the first one and then John's pp on the one he did.

The first one because of the colours and dark tree outline.

John's does add another bit of interest for me, thr round buidling on the shore.
I think it just adds a bit, tells us something happens or happened here which the first pic misses.

Just my 2c worth.

Rbn

[fandy]

Hi- These remind me of the old film days before Photoshop. They use to be perfectly expectable and in my opinion still are.

But now-a day’s people like to push things as far as they can so there are several ways you have more detail in the future. One is with Graduated Neutral density filters. These filters are gray for part of them and clear on the other part. This allows you to cut the light in the bright areas reducing the dynamic range of the scene. They are sold anywhere camera filters are sold and are a standard part of many people’s kits. If you are unsure of what dynamic range is this web site has ample explanations in the tutorials.

Another method is HDR which is basically shooting multiple exposers and blending them in Photoshop. You can find a number of web sites that explain the technique.
Or you can also use graduated filters in Photoshop. The only problem is you have to have detail in the highlights or shadow to bring out in the original exposer.

[terrig]

Thank you all so much for your input. I appreciate it.