My weather app predicted nice cloud coverage for this spot so I wanted to shoot the sunset with a nice vibrant sky above this little chapel yesterday evening. Unfortunately, there were no clouds. To not head home without any images I still captured a few shots. I’ve been playing around with this image in particular for the past few hours not knowing what to do with it (since I was hoping for different light and conditions). Finally, I decided to go for a “Wes Anderson Look” with super soft contrast, a bit of glow and pastel colors.

1. Basic Adjustments

First off, I wanted to reduce contrast. For that I brought up the exposure A LOT making everything brighter. To prevent clipping in the sky I dropped the highlights and whites pretty much all the way and I also raised shadows and blacks heavily to further reduce contrast. This helps a lot achieving a much softer looking image.

The base raw image was way to cold, to fix this, the temperature was raised. I also brought up the vibrance to make the colors a bit more intense.

Finally, the texture was increased for sharpness, while clarity and dehaze were dropped to add a soft glow on top.

2. Masking.

I only needed a bunch of linear gradients to balance the blues of the sky. The left side was a bit too dark so I made it brighter and also made the blues a little less saturated. The right side was too bright so I made it slightly darker.

Also, I added a radial gradient creating a bit of glow coming in from the right side by increasing the blacks and dropping the dehaze.

3. Color Grading

For the “Wes Anderson Look” I brought down the blue hue first to introduce more cyan to the sky. Besides that, the yellow and green hue were also dropped. Then, I decided to drop the saturation of yellow, green and blue.

Using some split toning  I warm color was added to the highlights and mid tones of the image. And finally, I dropped the blue primary hue and raised its saturation in the calibration panel (and of course removed my hand in Photoshop :D )

Tried to go for the "Wes Anders Look". Might be a bit too warm?