Skies

Eddy

Hi All:
Got a question for anyone.. Wht type of poloriser to use when shooting clouds, Should i be using regular or is something out there to bring the cloud into a state of dark, dreary black with the alot of texture from the clouds

pathfinder

While a circular polarizing filer will darken skies at a 90 degree axis to the sun, most of the skies you are describing in images are the result of image processing with curves, or of multiple exposures, either pairs of skies and foregrounds, or HDR.

First you have to have a good. stormy sky, and then pull down the curve in the area of the sky like this one by selecting the sky in one of several ways. I usually use the Quick Select tool today. No polarizer for this multi frame pano. Polarizers tend to create issues with large panos.

Eddy

wooow PAth thast excatly what i am looking for .. not to much not to little and you hit it right on...Sweet

pathfinder

Aw shucks!

I drove through that storm coming east out of Albuquerque, and it was a doozer - even the 18 wheelers pulled off the Interstate to wait it out, and the 18 wheelers never stop for anything. But they did that day!

pathfinder

Or you can shoot HDR style multi frame exposures and get skies like this from Wupatki National Monument after rendering the hdr and then tonemapping and curves.

ziggy53

Wonderful examples here Pathfinder. thumb

Rhuarc

Pathfinder,

Any chance you could point to a tutorial for what you did there? I have tried doing things like that, but I can never seem to get the tone mapping right.

pathfinder

I don't have a link I can send you to directly, much of my HDR stuff comes from reading Stuck in Customs, and "Practical HDR" by David Nightingale. Nightingale's book is one of the best I think - direct, clear, and easy to follow with outstanding images for examples.. He even loves graffiti painted alleys as much as I do, but his images are a lot better than mine.... This one is mine.



Here is another sky I shot as an HDR, it really seems to help capture the range of tones in stormy skies to shoot them in HDR



I do use Photomatix for my hdr rendering and tonemapping, but my goal is pretty much a nice flat image with a wide range of tones, that I can then take to Photoshop to create the contrast and saturation qualities that I need for my final image. Tonemapping is not to create the image, but just get the tones into the 16 bit tiff that is going into Photoshop for final editing.