The Quick Shot Artist Standard Classification of Sunsets defines three broad categories of sunsets: dim out, fried egg, and flaming. All are of interest to photographers, but the greatest potential for drama is definitely in the flaming category.

We were starting to drive back to Kailua-Kona from Waimea on the Big Island of Hawaii when we happened upon a classic flaming sunset. The QSA philosophy is to not worry about exposure and let the automatic camera do its thing. But like all great philosophical principles there are exceptions. An automatic exposure of a sunset produces a wimpy wash-out image that cannot be fixed in Photoshop™. The best strategy is to underexpose the image, then lighten it in Photoshop.

The problem posed by flaming sunsets is related to that posed by flowers having pure colors discussed in a previous post.

The camera records three color components (red, green, blue), each on a scale from 0 to 255. Pure white is (255, 255, 255) and pure red is (255, 0, 0). Suppose that there is a shade of orange that might be captured as (220, 150, 70). The shade is embodied in the ratio of the color components, such as 220/150. Now suppose we double the exposure. If the camera could record (440, 300, 140) everything would be fine. But it can’t, because its limit is 255. So doubling the exposure will yield (255, 255, 140). We are headed towards white, (255, 255, 255). If we later darken the image in Photoshop, the ratio 255/255 might change to 180/180, but the 220/150 ratio is lost and cannot be recovered. The result is wimpy and washed out.

Flaming sunsets have silhouetted clouds and foreground objects. The camera takes those into account and sets an average exposure for the scene. The average provides more shadow detail, but it overexposes the bright colors. If the frame is nearly full of bright color, as with telephoto shot of a fried egg sunset, the exposure will be correct.

On many cameras there is +/- button somewhere. Press it and set the exposure to 1 stop on the minus side, then take the shot. Here is my original, one stop underexposed:

It is too dark, but now lightening it in Photoshop can be done without losing the colors. I did the adjustment in steps. First I just lightened the image. The result is:

Then I used the magic wand tool to select the dark foreground. Getting just the foreground, and no sky, required adjusting the Tolerance number in the bar above the workspace on the left. The foreground started to show some speckling due to the underexposure, so I used 2.5 pixel Gaussian blur from the filter menu to smooth it out. Losing some detail won’t matter; it is mostly silhouette anyway. Finally, I used Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Highlights/Shadows and boosted the shadow brightness:

You might wonder why the scene looks more like New Mexico grasslands than tropical Hawaii. Hawaii has a remarkable assortment of climates because the Islands having a wet side and a dry side and elevations from sea level to over 13,000 feet. The vegetation also depends upon how recently the land was covered by lava. In the area of the photo, the lava fields are being naturally reclaimed into grasslands.