That old sunset problem - RAW challenge

Here's a picture of a god sky/sunset over Mount's Bay.
I'm not happy with it because of the usual problem of how to process it. Sky detail/ land detail/general believability, as it's not actually a sunset yet.
It's a 3 shot panorama taken with the 35mm Macro ltd. and stitched into a single raw file in Lightroom.
If you would like a play, the file can be downloaded here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ee2imuc92d1ra7q/K5II3585-Pano.dng?dl=0
Here's a quick render

John, I think you may have accidentally pressed the 'chop image off at bottom' button ...... easy to do if you lean the wrong way

Colours are nice John
Not sure about the grain.

cannot get it to open in CS5, says not compatible with ACR version, i think i would have done a 5 shot bracket then processed them with photomatix . tried to load it into that as it will process single images but the whole thing goes purple

Here is a very quick attempt using the image posted above; ie not the full size one.



Tweaked in ACDsee Pro7 using its 'lighting' tool applied to the foreground, a slight reign in on the highlight tool and then a small decrease of vibrancy. A mask on the sky to enhance contrast might help a bit too (eg the 'grey grad' filter ACDsee also has

edit; Having posted, looks slightly 'flatter' than in ACDSee

The grain is maybe a little too much at this size, but the colour boost helped i think. Nigel, do we need the foreground? With any image I always ask myself what I'm making an image of and anything that isn't part of, IMHO, shouldn't be there. Hence I culled the foreground.

I like the extra red in yours John. I think it does need more foreground tho, not just for balance but to contextualise the cloud formation (the latter being a personal thing as it's shot from my tank on the hill).
Andy: yep, that's kinda how mine were turning out, when I tried to even out the exposure; the green goes a bit weird eh?

ahh, silly me .... there I was assuming your fingers had slipped

OK .... DNG downloaded, thanks Mark ..... will fire up Sagelight 4.4 later and see what it can do! Will try and post a result tonight .

Edited in PaintShop Pro:




Cheers.
Philip

Interesting challenge
WB set to Daylight in LR, applied K5ii colour profile (QPcard), and a few digital ND grads.
Foreground +1.0EV grad, highlights adjusted in sky, and a circular grad applied to the sun to bring back some detail.

Haven't got the machine with my X-Equals film profiles... but will try again with those!

Thanks guys.
Mr B. looks like you used the JPEG as it's posterising a bit, but I like how you've removed some of the jaundiced look of the original.
Matt, that looks very natural from here. Pretty similar to how I remember it.
After seeing John's warm version, I had another play and mine looks like this at the moment.
Very illustrative and purely for screen viewing; way too dark for print I suspect.


Click for large version.
Usual tricks in LR gradient filters top and bottom for tint and clarity mostly. Then I cheated and warmed the whole lot up in PS Topaz! shock horror Not too sickly or OTT I hope.
Feel free to rip it to shreds, it's just a bit of fun.

Uploaded to Lr. Slightly warmer WB than daylight, lightened it up a bit, raised shadows, clipped highlights, removed noise. Went into ColorEfexPro 4, enhanced detail, added neutral grad to darken top and lighten bottom. Back into Lr to remove the extra noise due to excessive pp!!

Here's my take on it ..... I've assumed its basically a daylight shot underexposed, so I've gone for a lighter look and worked to bring out detail while controlling noise in the brightened foreground.

First up into Sagelight 4 for tonal stuff, shadow raising and low-tone contrast boosting, brightness and highlight control, a little polariser and vibrance.

16bit TIFF exported out into PS CS2 for selective (via layers) noise reduction and detail enhancing with Topaz DeNoise. A little colour balance adjustment and a little detailing with Topaz Detail 5 (again on a layer selectively for the ground only). I corrected for barrell distortion and straightened, cropped as required following this.

Very good job Nigel. It doesn't look anywhere near as dramatic as the other renderings but it does looks very convincing, I think you are probably right that this is more how it originally looked.