Fun With Photoshop

As some of you out there on the webs may have read before, I don't consider myself to be a Photoshop specialist.  I usually stick with the bare minimum and rarely stray further than cropping, colour balance, Curves and fixing dust spots.  But, sometimes when I feel a little lazy and don't want to do much of anything around the house, I spend a little extra time with some photographs and try out various different tools and settings.  That's how I came up with the two photographs you see before you here, both of which come from the same original photograph that was taken at f/4, 1/1000sec ISO 100 at 200mm.  The first photograph represents more of what I had in mind when the picture was being taken.  The night before had been a nice red sunset, so I went out and tried to capture it next to one of my favourite subjects, the Montreal Biosphere.  However, that night the sky didn't get as red as I was hoping it would, so I used the Curves tool and to darken the photograph a little and adjusted the colour using Colour Balance.  While I was doing that, I got to playing around the the Curves tool and actually got a nice looking sky by accident, though I ended up liking it just as much as the red one.  So, we get two versions of the same photograph.  In some simpler terms for those of you who are as fiscally aware as I, you get two for the price of one.  What a bargain!