The overall color tone in this is really good. -Doug

Beautiful light on the capitol Helen and the composition looks great. Nice sharpness in that camera and your PP really brought out the details.

Beautiful glow and incredible detail Helen. I too tend to smart sharpen followed by USM but with very different settings. I should probably experiment more or read one of my unread PS books because you got a very nice result here. The sky looks very natural to me and maybe you changed it some. I was outside this building a little over a year ago and hoping to go inside, but they close the tour quite early :-( It really is a grand site to behold.

Beautiful, and the colors look just right from here.

The USM is such a wonderful tool. My wife bought me a Photoshop Seminar for Christmas 2007 in Dallas. This guy spent a full half-hour showing us things you could do with it. He first started out at a radius of 500 to show off local contrasting on a grand scale (it enhances the light/dark relationship of pixels 500 apart). Then he made experimental steps inward to a radius of 3 or 4 which was just plain old sharpening when you are enhancing the light/dark relationships a few pixels apart. The threshold was important only in that you definitely want a significant change in intensity before the tool is supplied or you will get banding in the wide open areas of even light and color.

Thanks, again for the comments. Deb, good point; the image I ended up with didn't quite reflect the intensity of color that I saw, so I'm sure I boosted the saturation a bit (something I do know how to do ;-)); perhaps I went overboard? The color isn't unrealistic for some of the dazzling sunsets we get here, but maybe for that sky it is. I'll have a look at it again when I get some time.

same subject different feel - I am not complaining - but the sky looks too blue for the orange glow. I guess if you are not too much into PP then it must be natural - fancy that :)

Post card perfect Helen. Shows the magic light at its best, well done.

Sounds like you're down at my level in PS skills Helen:-) I think the USM is what's doing it as I read a while back to make the picys look clear & free from any sort of hazing a USM of 30....40 or 40...40 etc seems to clean the picy up.
You're producing great looking picys from your camera which means you can see how the light works. Well done Helen.

Thanks, all, for the comments! Rod, I might have lightened it a bit (I can't remember now), but if I did, it wasn't much as far as the shadows go. I actually don't know anything about HDR, although I do like some of the results I've seen with it. For my own processing, after sharpening with Smart Sharpen (set to some specific parameters I learned long ago), I almost always add an extra USM of 20/60.0/0, which boosts the contrast a bit and seems to give the images a "harder" look, which I like. I imagine there is much more I could do to my pictures in PP, if I only knew how, but as I may have mentioned before, I am somewhat PS challenged ;-).

Such clarity and detail. The light is soft and warm. Agree with Rod, it has a HDR feel to it.

Excellent light Helen & the clarity is like your picys from the last challenge. How do you process to get this look, is it some kind of HDR? The shadows look very light which may rob some of your picys of the nice mood they can have in this light. It's all personal preference anyhow a.

It is still a beautiful piece of architecture especially with this light. I was there only a few days and I still have a dozen completely different pictures of it from almost the same vantage point (the mall) due to different times of day and clouds and storms. So I don't blame you one bit.