I've been waiting to take this shot for quite a while. These sailboats are stacked on the shore behind the Community Boating Center and are used for sailing lessons every day. I can count on them being stacked here every morning. What I was waiting for was the right sky and lighting conditions to make the shot, and I had that this morning on my way into work. For this shot, I was shooting directly into the sun - it's actually in the clouds just to the left of the top-right sailboat. Now, the reason I was waiting for this specific shot is that I'm taking a number of tutorials to learn the full range of features in Topaz Adjust. I needed these lighting conditions to do what I wanted in the post processing.
Almost everything in today's shot was done in Topaz Adjust. I applied a low key filter to start with, but then made a number of adjustments to the sliders in order to draw out the full depth of the sky. The biggest adjustment was to the number of light regions and to the adaptive lighting sliders. That's what broke the sky into such a dramatic range of intensity. I also adjusted the strength and detail radius sliders to add some crisp edges to the clouds. Most of the primary adjustments were tweaked, so they were too numerous to mention here. There's room for improvement - I didn't quite notice the ghosting on the middle boats until I uploaded it - but as a learning tool this shot served quite well.
