Not a good pic, but a great sunset

I got home Monday evening, and this sunset presented itself. I ran into the house grabbed my camera and tripod. After a few bracketed exposures, it disappeared as soon as it had appeared. Like the topic subject, I know the image has lots of problems, but I did want to share the sunset with the CSNP's.

nice little piece of land you have there.

I think it would be just fine if the title was, Great Sunset! Nice job Jan.

Looks kind of like a Normal Rockwell painting and therefore not too shabby!!!

Nice ambiance with the buccolic scene and intense red lines of the sunset.

I would remove the tower on the horizon...

Perhaps you talked this down too much.

the fisch

Beautiful sunset indeed. The setting reminds me of a simple time.

This is very nice Jan.

An adjustment or two in Adobe Camera Raw and/or Photoshop will help recover some of the vibrance and drama that I'm sure you saw in the scene. Basically, the image lacks both contrast and nice deep blacks, and what you want to do is spread its histogram out some. In ACR, you can do this by sliding the exposure to the right to brighten the image some and by sliding the black to the right to stretch the left of the histogram farther to the left and deepen the blacks. Optionally, you might also want to slide the vibrance to the right some.

You can also use the curves adjustment in either ACR or Photoshop to jack up the mid-tone contrast a bit.

If you'd like I'll post a version of the image with these changes made to it to show you what I mean.

Randy, please be my guest. I would appreciate anything you can show me.

This is a quick and dirty treatment and concentrates solely on the things I mentioned.

Randy, I see where you are going and I understand your recommendations, but I was trying to keep some detail in the distant clouds. I will take your suggestions, and I will try to improve the image. I have received a lot of family interest in this image, and I want to make it the best I can.

I guess we're just running into a difference in monitors then, Jan, because on the monitors that I've used to view the image, there's no loss of detail in the distant clouds. It may be that on the monitors you've used there's already plenty of contrast in the image.

You are probably right. On mine the highlights of the sunset are pretty blown out. My little home laptop may be a bigger problem than I thought. Thanks for your help, and I will view your image on another monitor.