Fading Colours Sunset Lanzarote final

The apartment where I am staying in Lanzarote is a 10 minute walk from the main beach of Puerto de Carmen. This provides plenty of opportunity to try out long exposure Photography with my BW 10 stop Neutral Density filter.

I have a free App on my Android smart phone into which I feed in the exposure reading without the filter and it then calculates the correct reading with the filter. This theoretical correct exposure seems to always come out too dark so I now increase this by at least 50% at sunset to allow for fading light.

This was taken on the Playa Grande beach Puerto del Carmen, Lanzarote at not far off low tide and was a 75 second exposure.

The picture was taken on a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10 mm. I tried a false HDR from the original RAW file with Plus and Minus 2EV images created but this created far too much noise in the rocks. I switched to just using RAW processing and got better detail in the rocks with the fill light slider in RAW

Photoshop

The picture was opened in Camera Raw and the Fill light slider was used to bring more light into the foreground rocks. Clarity and Vibrance were increased and the recovery slider used for highlights

Topaz adjust was used with stylized  presets group with Dark Ghostly preset to increase the softness of the sea. With Topaz applied on a layer a layer mask was used to exclude the effect from the sky and rocks.

Using selections Vibrance, saturation and brightness were separately adjusted for the sea and sky.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening and noise reduction.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro.

The healing brush and clone brush were used to remove sensor dust marks.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original and then the final result.

Original

Fading Colours Sunset Lanzarote Original

Final Image

Fading Colours Sunset Lanzarote final

For licences see Fading Colours Sunset Lanzarote

Edwin Jones