I thought that the sunset would be nice on Sunday, but I didn’t have much time to get anywhere.  I rushed over to Balboa Park and there was a 5 minute window where the color was amazing.  I took a few photos of the bell tower, and even tried to whip off an HDR or 2.  The problem was that there’s a palm tree right next to the tower with a little wind.  This caused the palm to be very soft in the HDR versions.

The color in the correctly exposed version had some amazing color but the tower was too dark.  I thought that I”d use the adjustment brush in Lightroom but had spotty results.  Then I decided to bring the photo into Nik Viveza.  Since the color was naturally over the top, there was no reason to touch this.  But I realized that I could add U Points to increase the exposure on the tower.  Worked easily with no masking required.

I was at work looking at the photos Ipublished yesterday.  One of them looked horribly dark on my work monitor.  On my home monitor I had liked the look of that photo.  But at work the shadow areas were unrecognizable.  I decided that I would take the photo into Photomatix & tone map it.  It is definately a brighter image.  Still fond of the original photo but want to see which version looks better on a variety of monitors.  So any comments are appreciated.