Sunset in the Little Empire

[daq7]

We used to have access to the roof of the building in which we have an apartment in Denver. They closed that off much to my chagrin.

[BlueRob]

No doubt your skills are improving Daq...I remember your first HDRs and this is much much better. The composition and crop is spot on IMO.
Really nice lighting also.
The only thing I might suggest is to be careful to what I guess HDRs aficionados call "ghosting" which can be seen is some of the buildings contours.
Great work :thumbsup:

[daq7]

Yeah there are some halos.

[daq7]

I don't want to pick nits, and I make this reply only for others who might be trying the same thing. HDR typically refers to pictures that are tone mapped. This is not. I don't use the term HDR anymore, because no picture shown on a LDR display is technically HDR. It is LDR with some effort to selectively take different elements of the HDR image and map them onto LDR presentation, like paper or LCD monitors. Technically a graduated neutral density filter is not different. This is an attempt to hand paint different layers. The downside of that is painting along the edges of high contrast transitions. I should have done better here, but at least it is possible here. If you have foliage or something like that it is hopeless and you simply have to use some sort of tone mapping software. Anyway, if I wanted to print this I would need to spend another hour or so cleaning up the edges.

[daq7]

Updated to take out some of the haloing. Changed a few other things as well.

[DrRoebuck]

I'm curious to see what the original looked like.

If you took this at the right time of day, with the sun rising or setting behind you, you might get the same effect, but a lot more natural looking.

Also, your horizon is tilted.

[Grandpaw]

I like this shot and think you did a great job. I also noticed a tilt to the right, Jeff

[readingr]

daq

I do like this and agree the tilt is horrible.

I think you have a lot of work to do here because where every building touches the sky there is "ghosting".

on the dome there is small part of a building on the left that really looks strange at this resolution and maybe a careful cloning out is in order.

The tall building on the right of the picture has a really strange shadow on the right (shadow side) starting at the same level as the building behind and to its right and the cloud seems to need more work to.

In fact there seems to be some banding in the sky in the centre of the photo between the two towers.

I am sure that the use of a polarising filter would have been a better bet and got you as good a saturation without all the problems.

Roger R.

[draymorton]

Absolutely love it, except for the tilt.

[daq7]

Tilt? You people are drunk.

Or wait, maybe that's me...

[BlueRob]

Yeap a bit of tilt that TBH I did not notice when I saw this the first times.
Slight but there plus some barrel distortion maybe?....easy fixes with your PP skills
Oh! BTW I like the first crop better.

[hminx]

Tilt aside like this shot a whole lot, apart from clouds, might be my screen but sharpening seems to have solidified them somewhat. IMO they should be a bit more fluffy