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Got up very early this morning, and treked off to kings park. I am really pleased with the results:




C&C welcome.

Very pleasing results!
Especially the colours in the skies - I've never been able to capture coloured skies on my many Kings Park pre-sunrise shoots

Good

Matty

Of the two I prefer the second since the sky is less hot. I think both could be improved by a grad ND effect to darken the top & lighten the bottom. This can be done either at the time with a filter or after the event with a software filter (I use the Nik Color Efex Grad ND PSCS plugin for this).

Sorry to sound ignorant, but do you think you could explain how these Gradient ND filters work? How would i apply the effect using photoshop?

stubbsy wrote:Matty

Of the two I prefer the second since the sky is less hot. I think both could be improved by a grad ND effect to darken the top & lighten the bottom. This can be done either at the time with a filter or after the event with a software filter (I use the Nik Color Efex Grad ND PSCS plugin for this).

MattyO wrote:Sorry to sound ignorant, but do you think you could explain how these Gradient ND filters work? How would i apply the effect using photoshop?

Matty you don't sound ignorant to me We are all learning, some of us are just a step further up the hill.

A Graduated Neutral Density filter is a piece of glass with an uneven tint from very dark to transparent running from top to bottom of the filter.If you have a very bright and a very dark area in your image you rotate the filter so the darkest area of the glass is where the bright area is and the transparent where the lightest is. You are thus selectively darkening part of the image. In shots like these the effect runs pretty much top to bottom, but in your skyline pano in another thread you'd use the filter running right to left (dark to light) when shooting the first rightmost bit of the pano to tone down the sky.

As I say though this can also be simulated in Photoshop. Here is a video link on such a technique and HERE is a description of another technique for this. Below is an example of what I mean with your second image (I used the commercial Nik Color Efex filter for this since I'm lazy)

 PS If you don't want me posting this reworked version of your image I'm happy to delete it.

Wow, that reworked version looks even better to me

Nice work on the PP Peter!

And Matty well done on getting up earlier enough to capture the original.

Peter, that post processing looks much better. I shall keep this ND Grad filter bizo in mind next time i take a shot with contrasting exposures.

Thanks for the advice mate, appreciate it

MattyO wrote:Peter, that post processing looks much better. I shall keep this ND Grad filter bizo in mind next time i take a shot with contrasting exposures.

Thanks for the advice mate, appreciate it

Matty

One other thing - if you know you'll use this trick in software you can under expose a little more and claw it back in PP using this technique so in that second shot you could have had a slightly shorter exposure giving more sky detail and having a more discrete flame, but used the grad ND effect to bring back the light in the foreground of the image. the best of both worlds.

And just in case you haven't seen it THIS post shows the results with the real deal an ND filter on the lens.