Clouds Illusion, I recall

I really don't know clouds at all.

Okay, okay. I know what you are going to say. "The clouds could not have been that color. " Well, you are wrong! The sunset produced a deepening coral - a color I have not seen this intense in quite some time.

I decided to do a series of exposure brackets - 3 different exposures per bracket with a series of 3 brackets, each bracket offset by 1 EV. I decided to do this because there were so many layers of light in the clouds and I wanted to capture the varying intervals as much as possible. When I compared it with the original set of exposures, I did seem to catch the deepening light in the clouds. I chose to shoot this at f9, since I wanted detail at each level, and my lens' sweet spot is f9 to f11. Because of the deepening light, I chose to shoot at ISO 400.

After I shot the series of 9 shots, I then merged them using NIK HDR Efex. I tried just merging them within Photoshop, but I was very unimpressed with the results. After I merged them, I noticed the slight halo effect above the clouds. I then captured the same image in black & white and overlayed that on top of the color image then reduced the opacity to about 50% Please note that the only adjustments I made were to deepen the contrast a bit and add the b&w layer discussed above. You will note the halo above the clouds which is characteristic of HDR merged shots. I point this out because some of you have asked what I mean by a halo. Rather than edit the shot to remove the halo, I kept it as an illustration. Once a teacher, always a teacher.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Thank you so much for your wonderful comments, stars and favos for my mother's birthday. You are all so kind! Thank you!