After finishing the first image that focused on lighting at midday I moved onto my second image.
Lighting 2 - A vivid sunset
For this second image I wanted to create the feel of a sunset, which was not at all easy because for a start the sun was in the wrong place for a sunset. However, since the main point of creating these images was to be experimenting with lighting, rather than editing scenery in a photo, I decided to leave the sun where it was and work around it. The only downside to this is obviously that it meant the final photo did not look as realistic as a real sunset.
Since the image was not going to look realistic anyway, I decided to make the colours and lighting a lot more vivid and intense that it would usually, just for the purpose of making the photo more appealing.
The main aim of this photo was to be a lot darker than the first, allowing me to bring out shadows and detail that I originally edited out of the daytime image. Firstly I removed all the colour from much of the foreground such as the leaves, and changed the light levels to make them appear a lot darker. I think this made the image a lot stronger as there was now a heavy contrast between the dark leaves and the bright sunbeams breaking through them.
I decided to include the original clouds in this photo as well because a plain sky didn't look particularly interesting when compared to the rest of the photo.
Several simple orange-yellow gradients were added with the layers set to Color and Linear Burn, as these gave the impression that the ground was being lit by this colour, rather than being heavily masked.
This technique works a lot better than simply changing the Hue of the original image, because it applies the colours differently depending on the RGB levels, rather than just shifting the colour along the spectrum, causing some colours to become distorted and creating artefacts/noise.
Finally, several more layers were added with orange-yellow/red-yellow gradients around the sun, which gave the sun the burning effect that you usually see at sunset when it is lower in the sky. Several cleanup layers were created which I used to go over the whole image a last time and make any small changes to lighting or to blur anything that looked noisy or grainy. The final image has again been scaled down to fit the page:
