Call it a Day!

The story of this photo:
Today, I am doing something very unusual – a truly daring experiment. I am breaking new ground. I am… hold on to your seats …posting an image that is almost straight out of the camera. Tadaaa!

No HDR, no hours of intensive post-processing (to compensate for my mediocre shooting talent). Just a tiny bit of very straight-forward, basic, boring you-do-not-need-any-of-this-photoshop-crap processing. Free of any masking!!!

It’s not that I did not try, though! I did! But that image resisted all attempts to improve it. Increasing the saturation even slightly would bring out very ugly artefacts. It was like the photo was looking at me with a bored look on its face saying “Ahhh, forget it!” So, I eventually gave up, decided that you will have to live with the ugly truth and called it a day. LOL

I hope you enjoy it nevertheless!

By the way, this sunset shot was taken at the beach of Khao Lak, Thailand!

Take a look at my “HDR Cookbook”! It contains some more information on my techniques.

Success story:
Ok, made it! This is my first photo that made it to explore. Thanks to everybody for the comments and faves.

This photo has obviously been featured in explore before but there is no record of it. Now I have put that behind me! Strange how you strive to get there even if your mind tells you that it is not all that important.

How it was shot:
> Taken with a tripod
> Camera: Nikon D90
> Lens: Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200mm 1:3,5-5,6G ED VR
> Details can be found here

How it was post-processed:
> Post-processing was done in Photoshop
> Slight rotation to get the horizon dead straight (the least I could do!)
> Slight cropping
> Topaz Denoise [details]
> Levels layer to brighten the photo a bit
> Vibrance layer to anhance the colors
> Vignette effect using a masked fill layer [details]
> Sharpening using the high-pass filter [details]

Any comments, feedback or criticisms are highly welcome! Thanks for viewing!