Evening Contrails

Here is a little example of the small things you can do to an image in Lightroom that only take one minute and have a big effect on the finished photo. This is an evening shot from the other night.



The first action in Lightroom was to straighten the picture a bit by adjusting the angle of the crop. What I try and do with buildings is pick the longest horizontal or vertical line and get it as close to level without pulling the other parallel lines out of whack.

Next comes Recovery. I used about +70 on this edit to really make the windows pop. After that I added 50 Clarity. Then a small(+30) tweak on the Vibrance and +20 Saturation to bring a deeper blue into the evening sky. Lastly I gave the corners a bit of definition with some Lens Vignetting. I don't usually go negative and darken any corners, but it does seem to work on this image. Here is the end result.