Sunset

There's nothing like a nice sunset.  We were driving back from watching a grizzly bear on a carcass in the Yellowstone River in Haden Valley when this nice sky appeared in front of us.  There was really no good place to stop, so I just shot it through the windshield of the car.  That's not the best thing to do, but sometimes it's the only way to get the shot.

I used Topaz Impression2 on the top picture to give it a dreamy effect.  The bottom picture had very little editing.  Just minor adjustments in ACR and a little help from NIK Color Efex.  A photographer friend asked if I knew how to get some of the painterly effects that I use just by using Photoshop.  I'm sure they can all be created in PhotoShop, but it's much easier to just select the presets in a plug-in and then do whatever alterations you need after that in order to make it your own.  Sometimes I can figure out how to create the effects in PhotoShop and other times I can't, especially if it's painterly effect with a lot of variations in brushwork, etc.   For this picture, however, all you'd really have to do is to soften the picture a little using the Gaussian Blur and then use levels to lighten it a little.  The real painterly effects would take a lot more work and time.   Which version do you prefer?