How can I make the sky in this photo more vibrant?

Question

I spent an evening walking around and shooting with my relatively new Nikon D7000 and I ended up not liking most any of the photos I took..

Let's take this one for example:

The sky was blue and vibrant when I took this shot. Why did it come out so dull?

I was shooting with aperture priority and ISO 1000 and 1600 that evening. What are some things I could have done to make this photo more vibrant?

Asked by Sonic Soul

Answer

Some post processing is needed for some images, and most images benefit from some post processing.

When you take an image like this, where most of it is blue, the automatic white balance will be fooled into thinking that the image should be much less blue. If you had used the "daylight" setting for white balance, it would have been a lot closer to the actual colors.

I wan't there, so I don't know how it should really look, and it's also up to each photographer to create their own experience of the siuation, but here is an example of what you can do with it:

Temperature: -31
Tint: +14
Exposure: -1.05
Fill light: 5
Blacks: 2
Brightness: -1
Contrast: -6
Clarity: +10
Vibrance: +10

Answered by Guffa

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Why does blue sky gets rendered as black in black and white film photos?

Question

I recently started using a film camera along with my digital camera. I took a picture with both the cameras. This one is from digital camera:

Left is the photo without editing and right after selecting "Black & White Treatment" in Lightroom. See the way sky is rendered white. This is what I was expecting from film camera without any filter. But I was pleasantly surprised to get this:

This is a scanned copy of the print I got from film. The blue sky is rendered black. I shot this on Ilford Pan F Plus at ISO 50 with sun towards the right of the frame.

Now my question is, what is it that rendered the blue sky black? Is the characteristic of this particular film or some contrast in the scene or the guy who developed this for me played some nice trick.

Asked by Vikas

Answer

Your printer appears to have done quite a bit of burning in of the sky area (and of the closer of the two rock faces, as well as some general vignetting). It's a pretty good job, but you can see some lightness close to the hill that wouldn't be there if the darkness was the film's response to the sky.

Panchromatic black-and-white film is generally more sensitive to blue than to other colours (although by how much varies with the emulsion, some being more sensitive to greens and others to reds than others). In order to get a substantial sky, you normally need to use some sort of colour filtration, normally in the light yellow to deep red range. Without filtration, a blue sky will normally be very light in tone, without much distinction between the sky and clouds.

When shooting black and white, you should consider a K2 yellow filter and a #25 "light red" (it won't look very light to you when you see it) to be standard parts of your kit. The K2 will render the sky more or less "normally"—that is, there will be a distinct tonality to the sky, lighter at the horizon and getting darker as you move up, with visible clouds. The #25 will give you a much darker sky and more dramatically contrasting clouds (assuming white clouds, of course). There are filters covering the range between the K2 and the #25, but they're sort of "neither here nor there"—they're not strong enough to really be dramatic, but are obviously filtered. To get the Ansel Adams-style black skies, you might want to use a #29 dark red filter.

You can approximate the look of filters when converting your colour digital images to black and white, but with a great deal more control over contrast than you can get with an ordinary optical filters.

Answered by Stan Rogers

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What is the best way to handle overexposed sky in post-processing?

Question

I'm new at photography and I have taken some pictures where the subjects in the foreground are exposed correctly but the sky is very overexposed. What is the best way to handle it in post production?

(I have pictures in RAW format.)

Asked by Kreker

Answer

I use Apple Aperture, and this is my normal way of dealing with an overexposed sky (or anything overexposed for that matter)

1. Turn on overexposure highlights (option-shift-h), to show where detail is lost to overexposure
2. Turn up the "Recovery" slider in the "Exposure" plug-in, until no overexposure is shown (or until the slider is at max). Recovery will bring down the exposure of overexposed bits of the photo.
3. Turn up the "Highlights" slider in the "Highlights & Shadows" plug-in until the image is visually pleasing (you get the details you are looking for, e.g. interesting cloud formations)
4. Adjust the the Levels.

Answered by Pete

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Why do the noon skies look nasty in these photos, and what can I do about it?

Question

Posted for evaluation. Why is the sky so nasty? These images where shot at high noon with a polarizer. Is there a way to "clean up" the sky. Keep in mind also these have already been processed in post and I'm happy (enough) with skin tones. But the skies man, the skies. So green. My guess is Rayleigh scattering coupled with pollution. Any thoughts?

Answer

Under Rayleigh scattering the sky will look greener and then yellower the closer you get to the sun, however with the sun high in the sky I don't think that's what is happening here. I think pollution is a more likely cause, especially as it seems to exist close to the horizon. Filters (polarizing/UV) may make the sky a darker, richer tone, I'm not sure they would change the hue, though I suggest you try filtering if you have one to hand.

The white balance in the images is fairly warm, which looks good for the skintones but will always give a yellower sky than a cool balance. To maintain the skintones you can always adjust the hue of just the sky by a selective colouring tool in post, or boost the saturation of the blue primary in raw conversion.

Hope you don't mind me editing and reposting the images, but here's the original first image, cooled down slightly:

And here's the original image with just the cyan tones shifted toward the magenta end of the spectrum in Photoshop:

And finally just to show you how far you can go with selective colour adjustments, here's the original image cooled down with the sky shifted and the grass made to look a little bit more alive!

Finally, the second image seems to display lens flare on the right hand side, is it a crop from a larger image? If not I don't know where the flare is coming from as you're not shooting that close to the sun. edit It's probably just something white floating close to the lens, thus totally out of focus.

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What is the best way to get rid of white skies in post-production?

Question

I know, a photographer should generally try to not shoot against the light and take care of proper exposure. Still, as an amateur I frequently end up with "white skies", where there is no color detail at all in the sky. This can be because of shooting against the light, simply chosing the wrong moment, position or any other reason.

Yet, given such a result, which is better avoided then cured, what is the best way to post process such a scenario? A full image exposure correction (I shoot in RAW) darkens the foreground too much, so it seems selective exposure correction is the way to go. That however can be very tedious in complex images (imagine a complex tree on a white background) and I've found results to be unnatural.

Is there a better way to filter / postprocess these white skies?

Answer

If the sky is truly blown out and has no detail, you can add some blue to it so that it's not so bright, and looks like a realistic blue sky.

• Select the sky. Given it is blown out this would be easy using Select > Color Range, and pick "Highlights" from the drop down options. Feather by a few pixels and use that as a mask to start. An alternate way is to create a white mask, then with the mask selected, go to Image > Apply Image and that will put a greyscale copy of the image into the mask - the sky being white, your adjustments will then be applied to the sky. You can use levels to bring the greys to black.

• Then add a cooling filter and select a nice blue, or add a blue solid color adjustment layer and lower opacity.

• with trees, it can look unrealistic. You can try the blend if trick below or use refine edge to expand/contract the mask to remove halo effects.

If there is a little bit of detail in the sky but it is very light, try this:

• from Camera Raw, click shift to open in photoshop as an object
• make copy of the layer with New Smart Object via Copy
• double click on thumbnail of the copy to open in Camera Raw
• use recovery slider and exposure until the sky looks good, click OK
• double click on the layer, not on the thumbnail, to bring up layer styles
• use the "blend if" sliders at the bottom to blend in just the skies.

For example, here I have the version with lighter skies on top. I've selected "blend this layer if" the values are between 196 and 255. This lets the darker version of the image bleed through where the lighter version has light pixels in the sky. So in the result you see the darker sky but the lighter foreground subject.

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What are some tips for photographing rainbows?

Question

The few times I have tried to capture a rainbow the results have been washed out. Although I have found a polarizing filter to be very useful for sky photography, I'm guessing that it would wipe a rainbow out, since it is basically a scattered light phenomenon. What are the aperture/shutter trade-offs?

Any rules of thumb would be helpful, but I'm especially looking for the gotchas to avoid, since time tends to be limited when a rainbow makes an appearance.

Answer

I don't think there's a lot you can do photographically. I think the quality of the photo will come down to how strong the rainbow is, and how you process the image (either by the choice of picture style/JPEG saturation level in camera, or Raw processing).

It takes a combination of factors which all have to come together to form a strong rainbow — you need strong direct sunlight, but the sun also has to be low in the sky. If it's above 42 degrees then the rainbow will fall below the horizon. Generally, when the sun is lower in the sky, it's not as strong. Midday in the winter, or morning/late afternoon in summer will give you the best strength to angle ratio, though it depends on your latitude. You also need an abrupt boundary between clear sky and rain, such as you get with a heavy thunderstorm. These also tend to bring wind, which disperses the cloud — making the rainbow shortlived. This is why really good rainbows happen rarely: they require many competing factors.

Aperture/shutter speed aren't going to make a huge difference, provided your shutter is fast enough to avoid camera shake. You're going to need a fairly wide lens to capture a rainbow, so depth of field is not going to be a problem. I'd opt for a usually-optimum aperture of f/5.6 (or maybe f/8). The main arc of a rainbow is always 42 degrees from the centre, so you need an 84° FOV to capture an entire rainbow. This corresponds to at least 20mm lens (full frame) or 12.5mm lens on a crop body. Rainbow light is strongly polarized, so take off the filter (as mmr states).

For post processing, a contrast/saturation boost will help bring out the rainbow colours and give the image some punch.

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How to take a good landscape picture against the sun?

Question

I like hiking, and usually take my DSLR with me. I often find myself in front of beautiful landscapes, with the sun really high or directly in front of me. The resulting pictures are usually pale, ie they lack contrast (I don't know if I'm clear). Also, the sky is usually very clear.

This can usually be post-processed, but what are the techniques for getting good pictures in such conditions ?

Answer

I think this is an example of: use the opportunities you have, rather than the ones you wish you had. The situation you describe is tricky, and it'll be difficult to get the kind of grand, well-lit landscape that you seen in magazines. But, as Kyle suggests, perhaps there are different interpretations of the scene that could work. Some specific suggestions (some of which are mentioned in other answers as well):

• Keep the sun off your glass (not just out of the frame): shoot from the shade, use a lens hood, shade the lens with your hand or a hat, etc.
• If you want a blue sky, underexpose or shoot in manual, spot-metering off the sky.
• A polarizer will help.
• Make note of interesting scenes and come back when the light is better.

Good luck!

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