Correcting A Totally Blown Sky...

Sunbum

Hi,
Any CS2 workflow tips/suggestions on how to salvage some nice pics with solid composition where the sky is blown (over exposed to the point of pure white and I did not shoot in RAW). I took some nice early morning shots on my hike up to Half Dome and the sun was pretty brillant at times. I've since read how to tackle such conditions by taking 2 pics with 2 different settings for foreground and sky. I do have a copy of Scott Kelby's latest book, but he doesn't touch on this extreme of over exposure.


Cheers,
Ty

dlibrach

Unfortunately, if no information is captured (i.e. the sensor just reads it as pure white), there is no way to recover it. If you had shot raw, there might have been more information in the file that you could pull out. Usually Raw images will hold another stop or so of light. JPGs throw any excess out for good.:cry

Yes, in difficult lighting situations you can take multiple exposures and combine them in post processing. That's pretty much what HDR images do.

Cheers,
Dave

jfriend

Sunbum wrote:

Hi,
Any CS2 workflow tips/suggestions on how to salvage some nice pics with solid composition where the sky is blown (over exposed to the point of pure white and I did not shoot in RAW). I took some nice early morning shots on my hike up to Half Dome and the sun was pretty brillant at times. I've since read how to tackle such conditions by taking 2 pics with 2 different settings for foreground and sky. I do have a copy of Scott Kelby's latest book, but he doesn't touch on this extreme of over exposure.


Cheers,
Ty

Since there is no information left in the blown sky in the photo itself, the only two options I know of are:

1. Artificially create a sky yourself. I would probably do it by creating a new layer, filling with a good sky blue, then probably applying a gradient to it so it's lighter at the horizon and darker above, then add some noise because computer generated gradients don't look real sometimes without a little noise and optionally you could add some clouds using a cloud brush. If you do a Google search for cloud brush, you will find a number of hits and some free downloads. Lastly, you can blend this layer in place of your blown out sky with either a mask or, even better, with a blendif setting so that your new sky only replaces the super bright sky in your image or maybe a combination of the two.
2. Take some sky and/or clouds from another image that has consistent lighting and white balance and paste it into a new layer above your existing image and then either mask or blendif constrain the new sky to just the sky area in your original image.

A google search for "sky replacement photoshop" gives you a whole bunch of step by step tutorials.

pathfinder

If the sky is totally fried, then you either deep six the shot, crop the sky out, or create a new sky by cloning one in, or by using a blue gradient.

Not a lot of nice options.

I always try to shoot a few frames of cool skies to clone into other images later.

f-rider

As mentioned, the clone tool and a good source photo can work wonders. I've used that technique before and no one is the wiser

BinaryFx

Two quick options using the data in the original image (yes, raw would probably have helped!):

i) See if the A or B channels from Lab mode hold any useful data (you may have to play with the contrast then blend it in).

ii) Dupe original layer, set to exclusion mode at say 1-5% depending on taste, then mask into the selected area (blend if sliders are a really quick way to do this while some may prefer a tonal layer mask).


Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

Sunbum

Thanks for all the good suggestions. I did actually scrap the few that had the sky blown, but felt their might be some ways to introduce good sky shots into the one that I liked. Fortunately, I did shoot a few early morning pics of the sky that are good and will play with the methods suggested here.

Cheers,
Ty

pyrtek

You got some good suggestions above. There's another method I like to use in
such cases and that's bringing in a new sky on its own layer and changing its
blending mode to Darken. In this mode pixels in the two layers are compared
and only the darker ones are shown, so the blown areas of your bad sky get
covered with the good areas of the new sky and other areas are relatively
untouched, making the transition between the fake sky and the real ground
much smoother.

One of the methods posted above I would absolutely avoid is cloning.
It would take an insane amount of time to do that kind of cloning well, and it
probably still wouldn't look as good as with the other methods mentioned here.

pathfinder

pyrtek wrote:

One of the methods posted above I would absolutely avoid is cloning.
It would take an insane amount of time to do that kind of cloning well, and it
probably still wouldn't look as good as with the other methods mentioned here.

Since I suggested cloning as a possibility, I will ask why you are so certain it cannot be done successfully, and in a limited amount of time and effort?

I have images that the sky was augmented by using the blend if sliders that work very nicely, but it is also quite possible to create nice blended masks today, either in Quick Mask or using the Quick Select tool that will look fine. One only needs a sky, shot from the same direction as the original image, shot at the same time of day, at a similar latitude, and the lighting should match perfectly.

pyrtek

pathfinder wrote:

I have images that the sky was augmented by using the blend if sliders that work very nicely, but it is also quite possible to create nice blended masks today, either in Quick Mask or using the Quick Select tool that will look fine. One only needs a sky, shot from the same direction as the original image, shot at the same time of day, at a similar latitude, and the lighting should match perfectly.

Where is the cloning in what you described above? I have a feeling we're not
talking about the same thing.

pathfinder

Cloning a sky from one frame into the original image. Yes, I did not mean to suggest that you could clone in a sky from the same original image, which by definition was 255,25,255

pyrtek

pathfinder wrote:

Cloning a sky from one frame into the original image.

Oh, then we were talking about the same thing.

Anyway, it's just my opinion, but to me, it's easier to dump a sky into an image
as a new layer than to meticulously clone one in. Whatever tool works for you,
though.

pathfinder

It does not have to be either or, though, Bernard. One can clone a new sky with the clone brush, or just copy and paste it into a new layer on the original image, and then blend the two images with a Quick Mask, or via the 'Blend If' command sequence

pyrtek

pathfinder wrote:

It does not have to be either or, though, Bernard. One can clone a new sky with the clone brush, or just copy and paste it into a new layer on the original image, and then blend the two images with a Quick Mask, or via the 'Blend If' command sequence

Well, it is either/or, since you're either doing it one way or the other.

In any case, I say use whatever method works for you. Personally, I can't imagine
going to the trouble of cloning in this case, but it is one way of going about
doing what the OP wanted and perhaps it will even be his/her preferred way.