Problem
The people are too dark. The sunset is only really in the center and it should feel more enveloping. the people are just a tiny bit blurry too.
Solutions
1. adjust brightness/contrast
2. resize field of view to guide attention
3. attempt to fix blurriness
Tools
1. irfanview - basic adjusts
2. photoshop - fine tuning
Procedure
1. irfanview->enhance colors, increase gamma correction to 1.5 and then increase saturation to 200 to compensate for the colors lost in the sunset. Adjust green and blue down slightly to compensate for over saturation, the slight red gives it a warmer feeling.
2. irfanview->select viewpoint, crop. You can do this in most programs, but irfanview is fast and you can see the picture in fullscreen quickly, where it shows it against a black background.
3. attempt to remove bluriness using photoshop filters, mainly smart sharpen at very low amounts (3% at 3px) using the lens blur.
Applying the workflow
The second photo was similar to the first in how the foreground was very dark. Similarily the the framing needed to be adjusted, but this one was set up a bit better to begin with. I wanted the photo have a more WIDE feeling as well, because in reality the sky and the water were all encompassing.
Conclusion
It took a bit of tweaking to make sure the sunset looked full of color. Only minor value adjustments were needed in the workflow. The end result looks and feels much better, warm and vibrant with rich colors.
Sometimes the best thing to do is to apply a mask in photoshop to the foreground and adjust the brightness/contrast separately from the background. This can be very time consuming, and should probably only be done to the most deserving photos.
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