Day 11 – Flathead Lake Sunset

Many of us have witnessed beautiful sunset, however most sunset pictures could be either too bright (over-exposed) or too dark (under-exposed), no matter if you are an amateur or professional photographer.  It could be a frustrating experience.

From my travels in the past 5 years, I have tried at least several hundreds, if not thousands of clicks of sunset photography.  There are a number of formula to achieve successful capture of beautiful sunsets, such as long exposure after dusk, HDR photography etc (it’s OK you do not understand these terms, I will introduce in other posts).  Nevertheless, most require advanced equipments.  Today I’d like to share a quick tip to use Adobe Lightroom to fix the common exposure problems of sunset capture.  You can easily enhance your sunset photographs within 2 minutes.

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Tip of the Day

I’ve recorded a video to showcase the exact process I use to edit sunset photography.  After many trials and errors, this is the most efficient and extremely effective approach I found in Lightroom.  As you can see, it took less than 90 seconds!  Although the recording was done in the latest version of Adobe Lightroom 5, if you have Lightroom 3, or 4, you can achieve the same result, since I only used the basic retouching module.

Adobe Lightroom 5 cost around $150, still at a fraction of Photoshop’s steep $700.  It is an excellent tool for all levels of photographers.  Among the dozens of photo software I’ve used, I found Adoble Lightroom the foremost important software.  If you want to save time organizing and retouching your digital photos, give Lightroom a try.  Enjoy photography, until then!

See below some more sunset moments I’ve captured at the beautiful Flathead Lake, Montana, on the 11th day of our 2-month road trip.  There will be lots more beautiful sunsets ahead.  I can’t wait to share more images and tips with you.

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