Several months ago I was photographing birds at a local forest preserve. My setup is not an amazing low-light performer, but the dark silhouettes of birds against the sunset sky with wind turbines in the far distance ended up as my favorite photos of the evening.
I think there is not a lot of data in the shadows to work with, but maybe room for creative color in the sky? My own edits are pretty neutral.
As an aside, the spots are insects, not sensor dust! No one will hurt my feelings if they remove them, I just prefer not to remove elements that were outside of my camera when I took the photo.
I played around with color in the first photo but just kept thinking it should be B&W so that’s what I did. Second one I was a little more comfortable with how the color worked out.
I did a very simple edit here. The only trick I would like to share is how I decided to use the color zones module as both an exposure tool and a chroma/saturation tool to influence the sky only with the no need for masking manually. This is a trick I apply more and more to my edits. The color equalizer works in a similar fashion, but I feel I have easier control over the shape of the curve in color zones module.
2024-05-17 201147-1194494.rw2.xmp (32.7 KB)
When I saw the vibrant colors that Sigmoid produced at 3.000 (max) contrast, I decided to go for this colorful gradient.
The image had a lot of spots though.
