Semi-Silhouette

I like working with semi-silhouettes a lot – where the foreground is darkened, but not completely blacked out. It's a little more the way you actually see it in real life since your eyes can work with that kind of contrast range better than the camera. I find that semi-silhouettes usually take a bit of tweaking in Lightroom because the camera is going to expose either the sky or the foreground correctly, but not both.

The obvious approach then is to expose the sky correctly, then raise the Shadows control in Lightroom to bring back some detail in the foreground. This approach works, but the problem is that the foreground will be so underexposed that raising the Shadows is going to result in unacceptable (and unnecessary) noise levels in the final image.

Since you know ahead of time that you're going to be post-processing the shot, a better approach is to optimize the photo for post-processing. That means providing Lightroom with the most detailed RAW image possible that doesn't over-expose any part. That means "exposing to the right" – setting the camera to expose the highlight area (i.e. the sky) as brightly as possible without over-exposing them. In other words, in the histogram there should be pixels all the way to the right side of the graph, but not piled up on the right side of the graph. Once you've brought the photo into Lightroom, you then pull back the Exposure control to restore the sky's vivid sunset colors, and lift the Shadows control to bring back some detail into the foreground. Don't over-do the foreground lifting though! You want just enough to show a bit of detail. If you over-do it, you'll get that fakey HDR look. Finally a bit of tweaking on the Highlights, Whites, and Blacks controls to taste will optimize the look.

Of course, all this is assuming you can get the exposure you need at a decent ISO level. For a photo like this, for me, I'd probably max out at around 800 ISO. Any higher than that, and the ISO noise would be bad enough that it would defeat the whole purpose of exposing to the right. Instead, I'd expose to get the colors in the sunset sky right and then lift the shadows in Lightroom.