How to Add color to sky

ThatCanonGuy

I took this shot last weekend and would like to add some color to the sky. How do you do this? I've gotten it a little better with the shadow/highlight tool, but it still needs some work.

Anthony

ThatCanonGuy wrote: »

I took this shot last weekend and would like to add some color to the sky.

[..]

If you add colour to the sky, it will need to be reflected (at least to some degree) in the water. I would start with a selective colour adjustment layer, using the cyan and magenta sliders in the whites and neutrals. Together with the use of masks to limit the effects, this would be one way to get started.

Anthony.

ThatCanonGuy

Thanks. Actually the reflection is not much of a problem because that is ice.

ThatCanonGuy

Here's the new one... too much?

jjbong

ThatCanonGuy wrote: »

Here's the new one... too much?

You're the only one who can answer that, as you know what you saw when you shot it, and what you want to bring out.

That said, it would be interesting to know how you did this. You got a bit more color, but you lost a fair amount of contrast (detail) in the clouds.

I used the following technique, developed by Dan Margulis, and described here [thread]21859[/thread] by rutt (he describes several - this is the first one, Man from Mars). Since the image is pretty flat, color-wise, you want to drive what colors there are apart. This technique involves some extreme curves in LAB in the A and B channels. In LAB, curves in the A and B channels only affect color, not contrast, and extreme curves drive colors apart.

Using this technique on your image, I got this:



Is this too much or too little? Only you can answer that. In this technique, you have a pretty simple knob (the opacity of an adjustment layer) to control how much color boost to get. And there are other techniques to deal with, for example, the right amount of boost in reds, but awful boosts in yellow. I can supply the details of what I did if you're interested, or if the explanation in the thread cited above is not sufficient.

In the process of working with the image, I noticed that it was also a bit flat in contrast, so I adjusted it (after the above color adjustment) to get this:



I'm not saying this is necessarily better - it depends on what you were trying to achieve in the image. I did this with a simple curve on the L channel in LAB.

kwcrow

I gave it a try.
Used LAB mode to increase color seperation especially blues and yellows and increased contrast in L channel.
Went back to RGB and increased contrast in important parts of individual channel curves.
Did local contrast sharpening.
1163803868_j9yQu-L_2.jpg

ThatCanonGuy

John, I like the first one. I think in the second, the trees are a little dark for my liking, due to the boosted contrast. I'll keep those in mind.

kwcrow, I like how the sky show a lot of color, but I don't think it has a very good effect on the ice. I think the sharpening also has a bad effect on the foreground rock. I'd like to know if there's a way to just get that color in the sky. The reflection doesn't matter because it's ice.

kwcrow

I agree that my process did some funny or poor effect on the rock and possibly the trees. I don't think it was sharpening that did it, but when I added steeper curves in the important parts of the sky, I apparently flattened the curve in the important parts of the rock. I should have masked the rock back in from the original. Unfortunately increasing the colors of the sky brought out a lot of chromatic noise in the image. I did some minor noise reduction on the sky and water. I'm afraid if you tried to only increase the colors of the sky without increasing the colors of the reflection it would look unnatural, but you could easily mask out the water in the more colorful layer to see what the results would look like.

ThatCanonGuy wrote: »

John, I like the first one. I think in the second, the trees are a little dark for my liking, due to the boosted contrast. I'll keep those in mind.

kwcrow, I like how the sky show a lot of color, but I don't think it has a very good effect on the ice. I think the sharpening also has a bad effect on the foreground rock. I'd like to know if there's a way to just get that color in the sky. The reflection doesn't matter because it's ice.