Photo Enhancement: Sunsets

I'm about to start a new series in my blog called "Photo Enhancement", which is designed to give you tips and tricks how to make your photos look better and how to avoid common pitfalls. I'll focus on the common subjects first, and today we'll take a look at sunset shots.

The picture on the left is my sample image (found at sxc.hu; feel free to download it and try out the steps below with the actual photo).

One major flaw is the crooked horizon, which can be found in many sunset photos (and landscape photos in general). However, it's easy to correct. In Photoshop, click on Image > Image Rotation > Arbitrary and rotate it 0.8 degrees counter-clockwise (CCW). After the rotation process you'll see the white canvas at the edges, so we also have to crop the image a bit. According to the eye-pleasing golden mean, the best crop ratio is 1.6:1, which means the longer side should be 1.6 times the shorter side. Therefore, I cropped it like this:



Cropping the image like this has another advantage, which again is due to the golden mean: The horizon is not in the center (a 50:50 ratio of sky and ocean looks static and boring) but it divides the line from top to bottom roughly in the ratio of 1 (sky) : 1.6 (ocean). A mathematically and aesthetically perfect composition.

So, we've solved the first problem of the crooked horizon. Another flaw of the image is the washed out colors. In order to fix this, I added a vibrance adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Vibrance) and increased the vibrance to +100. The result looks like this:



However, the contrast remains dull and the colors are still not vivid enough. Thus, I added a curve adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves) and modified the curves like this:



Simply grab the curve in the middle and drag it down until you get the desired effect.
The picture now looks like this:



Not bad, but in order to make it perfect we also have to reduce the noise (this is especially important for low-level shots at high ISO speeds). I used the NoiseNinja plug-in to do the job, which also sharpens the image a little more to give it that professional finish:



Finally, you might like to remove the distracting branches on the right side of the image. This is easily done with the clone stamp tool (hotkey: S) and the spot healing brush tool (J), so that the enhanced image looks like this: