I'm all out of deep thoughts this evening. So instead, a photography lesson. After the photos. Feel free to read it or not. It's about how I achieved these colours without using any artificial enhancements in post-processing.
Some of you may believe that I artificially enhanced the colour of these images in post-processing. I didn't. What you see is what I got (when I pressed the shutter button). Here's what I did do:
1. Don't despair if (like me) you have a knack for getting to the place where you want to take the photograph literally seconds after the sun dips below the horizon. The best colour is yet to come, after the sun disappears.
2. Don't overexpose the image. The foreground will be much darker than the sky. Allow your camera to meter off the sky (if it has that capability). That will turn the foreground black. It's not the end of the world. Silhouettes are nice, and so are pretty colours.*
3. If you are going to process the images using a program like Photoshop Elements leave the saturation slider alone. Instead use the highlights adjustment to restore colour and (sometimes) detail in the most highly exposed areas of the image. It does this by lowering the luminance in those areas and drawing out more of the natural colour captured by your camera.
*If you want to have your cake and eat it too (i.e a bright foreground and a pretty sky), learn about high dynamic range photography. Here is an example of that.
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