Peaceful sunset

Taken in Geelong. Winter is coming, the air is clearer and the clouds are good, so out taking picture and get this:



Due to colour cast from photobucket, better to view here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/passtube/art/6967783-1-a-peaceful-sunset

wow, nice one khoo yang~~~ a very "relaxful " evening~~~

Nice shot , any special tools used for this shot? GND, CPL, etc? Or just plain normal lens shooting?

we can't get a nice sunset here....

Thanks for sharing...

Thank you so much, Tai lou Max, CY and Simmon! Appreciated your comments.

Hi CY, for this shot, I used a 10-24mm wide angle nikkor lens. The secret behind is to use a Lee GND 0.9 filter to obtain the balance of the light and exposure.

And then, I do some masking in photoshop to bring out the foreground a little. And we know, the reflection in the water is normally 2 stops darker than it is in the sky, so I add a little contrast and darken the reflection in the water.

THe retouched version:

So it means the actual photo earlier was untouched where else the second photo is processed?

First photo is straight out from camera?

CY wrote:So it means the actual photo earlier was untouched where else the second photo is processed?

First photo is straight out from camera?

Hi CY,

The first photo I touch a bit on the sun, because it's slightly over exposed, and bring it down a little, the rest are almost there. Oh yeah...I added the 2 birds in PS.

I still haven't pay enough attention to my second touched photo, I think it's still obvious, the trace of post processing. I want to make it look more natural. You have any comment on how to improve? Please see this one:
http://www.redbubble.com/people/passtube/art/6967783-a-peaceful-sunset
more accurate in color.

Should you think I should increase the black pixel, shadow? adjust tonal range to increase red, or whatever? I am not happy looking at it...it looks fake....