Fixing a washed out sky

gloo

Hey guys! so back when I was pretty new to photography, I went on a trip to the Redwoods and snapped this shot. I went back and tried to edit it recently because I really like it, however, as you can due to my lack of experience I did not do a good exposure. i tried to fix it up the best I am capable, but i still have problems with the sky. I would love to see what tips and processes you guys would use to fix it.

a link to the original sized jpeg: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5004/5364343937_851e4ba2e5_o.jpg

divamum

What are you editing in? In PS, a contrast/brightness and saturation layer (appropriately masked) could bring out the sky (and I'd possibly use one on the foreground to bump that up); in LR, a gradient pulled down across it with contrast/exposure/saturation adjusted could help, too.

r3t1awr3yd

If you shot in raw, crank the recovery to 100.

Duplicate just the sky into a new layer, cut the bottom out and multiply the sky to bring back some details. That's what I usually do. Hope that helps.

paddler4

don't be too hard on yourself. That is a hard shot to expose. check out the trees. A lower exposure to protect more of the sky would have lost the detail in the trees.

Long term, the solution to shots like this, if they are extreme enough, is to use a tripod and blend two or more images with different exposures. Most people use HDR for this, but I think the results are often very artificial. Instead, I use exposure blending.

That won't help with this shot, of course. I think you have some good suggestions already. Recovery would my first step too, if I had the shot in RAW (which I always do)--it will pull down the brightest areas and restore some detail in them. As long as the sky is not blown out, there will be some detail there. After that, layers and selections may be the only way to go, so that you can darken the sky and not the foreground. I would lighten the foreground. I don't think a lightroom gradient will work well because of the uneven horizon.

Anthony

I had a little go with the image you posted. Essentially I used a masked selective colour layer to put a touch of blue into the white parts of the sky and then a gradient fill layer set to soft light to boost the sky overall. I masked some of the effect along the upper part of the trees to restore the detail.

Anthony.

Sam

You can not get all the dynamic range in this scene with one exposure. The bright area of the sky has no detail and can not be brought back.

This is an example of needed to take more than one exposure and blending them.

Here is my try.

chrisjohnson

Amazing, Sam.

gloo

Thanks for the suggestions all (sorry for the slow response)

Yeah, the sky is completely washed out. no data. looking back, Yes I would have shot this HDR/exposure fusion. Alas, at the time i did not know what it was, haha.

I re-edited the raw file in CS5 and camera raw. doing recovery to 100 does little to help the sky since there's nothing to recover. I like you're suggestion Anthony, i think i'll give that a play with PS in my spare time and see what I can do. maybe add a texture or something to kind of "hide" the wash out, lol.