I was on my way out of the airport when I saw the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus in harmony as the sun set. I've read about it in the news, but didn't expect to actually see this. Shot with my P&S Panasonic FX500 at 27mm, aperture 5.6, exposure of 8s, and ISO 100. Only after processing was a 50% reduction. Any critique would be appreciated.



I tried setting white balance using levels in Photoshop, but this is what I got. Any help in correcting the rough blue to black sky transition would be greatly appreciated. I think it has to do with my sampling of a grey car with the eyedropper tool.

If I read you correctly you have "white balanced" the first image above and ended up with the second one.

I am not sure that trying to white balance "correctly" a scene like this makes sense - after all you don't want it to look as though you took it in neutral daylight.

However I have corrected it to an extent using the ACR tool in CS4, altered the distortion slightly and done some noise reduction on it.

Probably should be cropped and rotated slightly too.

Welcome to the forum

Thanks for the quick response paulhodson. You are right, I tried to white balance the first image and the second image is the result. I like the warmness of the first image, but the sky is too dim. I recall that the lower sky was a beautiful shade of blue as I took that photo, so I was trying to recreate that. After looking at your image (thanks a lot), I concluded that I don't really like the picture white balanced. I do like the sky though.

I googled ACR, and the links are pointing to Adobe Camera Raw. I am surprised you can use ACR with jpegs. Learn something every day. I'm going to get Lightroom and see what it can do. Thanks for the welcome!

In CS4 you can use "Open as" from the file menu and then select "Camera Raw" from the drop down list of file types.