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Striking skies
01 April 2008
So, I think that I’ve figured out a couple great techniques for handling cloudy skies and making them pop. You can see it in tonight’s photos, a couple of which definitely took a little post-process love.
First, some background. I live in farm country out here in Ohio, on ten beautiful acres of land (thanks for the help, mom and dad!). I love the country - particularly in the spring and fall, when the thunderstorms boom or the leaves change. Obviously, we’re dealing with the former here - and last night a storm front rolled in right around sunset.
When you’re looking to capture color depth, you normally want to slightly overexpose your image (aka “shoot to the right” on a histogram). For pictures where the sky is a lot of the subject matter, this is doubly true. The gradients are usually along one color pattern - gray, blue, orange… so it’s very important to get as much of that bit depth as you can.
To do this, try using autofocus on your camera - focus up at the sky to let the exposure metering work, then adjust your shutter speed to about a full stop slower. Keep the button half pressed to maintain infinite focus if it’s a landscape shot. When you take your picture, it should look washed out, as you’d expect.
Now, to the dirty work. Bring your RAW file over in whatever manner you choose (I use Adobe Lightroom and convert to DNG format), and open the RAW up in Photomatix HDR. Tone map it as you see fit, but don’t worry so much about the sky. Focus on the subject matter in the foreground and make it look how you want it. This is mostly for the contrast - but I find Photomatix does in one step what I need about six steps to do in Photoshop. On images that can use all six of those steps (like anything with low contrast and uniform light), HDR is just a faster method to get the desired look.
Save the HDR image as a 16-bit TIFF file and open it up in Adobe Photoshop. Now, copy the background (it’s a locked layer) and apply any sharpening that you traditionally do to your new “bottom” editable layer. Once that’s done, it’s time to do the magic - copy the sharpened layer again.
To this second image layer, we’re going to apply a layer mask of “Hide all”. Take your gradient tool and paint a white gradient from the sky that should taper down nicely to the bottom of the foreground. We’ve now shown just the sky of this second layer (Anything covered by white on the layer mask is visible, black is hidden), vanishing as you hit the foreground.
At this point, you should see nothing unusual as compared to before…until you click on the picture layer that’s covered by the mask (the mask is handled separately and you’ll default to being on the mask and NOT your image). Change the blend mode to “Multiply”.
If you’ve done everything right, you should see a very highly contrasted sky where there was once just a mottled sea of very light gray. You can change the opacity of the layer to adjust how dramatic of an effect it has, or play around with other blending options.
There are, of course, other ways to achieve this effect with other skies - but this works faithfully with gray, overcast skies that are normally just “blah” to look at!
Topics: Photo Shoot, Post Processing, Technique |