I was exploring the book module in Lightroom 4 and started putting together a photo book on our recent trip to Ocho Rios, Jamaica. I was thinking that it would make a nice coffee table book of our trip for us. I am really excited about the whole idea, even if I just print one copy for us, it seems like a great way to display a lot of images without taking up a lot of wall space. Anyway, I plan to use the one, good sunset HDR image that I got while we were there as the cover, but the more I looked at the result of the first post-processing session that I had previously posted, I felt it lacked something. It was a pretty good representation of what the actual scene looked like when the 7 bracketed exposures were shot. I just thought that a little warming of the image would make it pop more. I brought it back into Photoshop CS6 beta and went to the Topazlabs Adjust 5 plugin. Under the Vibrance collection of presets there is one for Setting Sun – Dynamic. This made it a little too warm, so I played with the Warmth slider under FINISHING TOUCHES adjustment and cooled it off a bit. The result was what I was looking for. It did bring out a bit too much magenta in the darker clouds in the upper left of the image, but a little creative use of layer masks help tone that down.
