How should I process these photos?

[Free]

Hi All,

Just wondering what you think I should do with these shots...





At the moment they are SOOC and (I think) pretty good, but I want to make them better!

I usually just sharpen with a high pass filter and occasionally use the levels - copy - equalise method I found from someone on here but I'm not sure that's going to give me the real WOW factor I'd like from them.

Any thoughts?

Cheers
Free

[Samanax]

Which photo editor are you using?

[edbayani]

these are beautiful shots. the only thing that bothers me is the white sky.
in photoshop, if you have a photo of a sunset you can drag the photo to your image. this will cover your photo. go to the background original photo. go to select, color range and click on the white sky, then adjust the slider to the right till all the whites are selected and ok.
this selects the white press ctrl/shift i to inverse the selection. then go to the upper layer which is the sunset sky, click the layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette and press alt backspace or delete to erase the unwanted sky. you can fine tune with a soft brush set to 50% opacity, if satisfied, flatten and save.

[Free]

Originally Posted by Samanax

Which photo editor are you using?

haha, my bad - Photoshop CS3.

Thanks edbayani, I'll see if I can find a suitable sky, I tried with one earlier, but wasn't really happy with the way the sunburst blended in to the other sky.

[PrimeTime]

How about something like this...............not much you can do about the blown out sky though.

Layer mask on the sun area and darkened with multiply mode and blended in.

Decreased the contrast with inverted blurred layer mask

Added a little saturation to red, yellow, and green.

Dodge and burn on the wall...................darkened a few stones to make the wall pop a little.

Contrast layer

Sharpened.