Help - Blown out sky

firstdraft33

I have cropped this image down a bit, but there is still some blown out sky. I am not all that great with PS, and what ever I do seems to just make the sky gray and unattractive. Plase help with any suggestions.



Thanks alot for your help, I just want to make this image as good as it can be, so any suggestions/criticism would also be appreciated.

silica

there are many tutorials on replacing the sky. You can do it by just selecting the sky and replacing the selection with a blue gradient. Or you can replace the sky with an authentic sky, as in this tutorial:

http://www.picturecorrect.com/photoshoptips/replace_sky_photoshop_tutorial.htm

DavidTO

This may help.

Well, it WILL help, if you choose to read it!

firstdraft33

Work in progress

DavidTO wrote:

This may help.

Well, it WILL help, if you choose to read it!

Thanks alot for the help, here is what I have so far. I am going to continue to work on a more natural color for the sky.

Dna

Did you shoot raw ? If so you can expose in your raw program for the sky and then for the water and merge the two in photoshop.

If you upload your raw to somewhere I'll show you what I mean.

Dna

firstdraft33

Dna wrote:

Did you shoot raw ? If so you can expose in your raw program for the sky and then for the water and merge the two in photoshop.

If you upload your raw to somewhere I'll show you what I mean.

Dna

Sure appreciate the help. I uploaded the file to:
http://www.me103.com/photo/

Thanks

Dna

firstdraft33 wrote:

Sure appreciate the help. I uploaded the file to:
http://www.me103.com/photo/

Thanks

Ok. My technique doesn't work as there is no detail left in the sky. So you will have to use some sort of replacement technique.

I did have a quick play with the raw though...

Dna

firstdraft33

Dna wrote:

Ok. My technique doesn't work as there is no detail left in the sky. So you will have to use some sort of replacement technique.

I did have a quick play with the raw though...

Dna

Thanks, The pic looks alot better.

silica

firstdraft33 wrote:

Thanks alot for the help, here is what I have so far. I am going to continue to work on a more natural color for the sky.

If you decide to go with a replacement, I have found a lot of nice sky photos at istockphoto.com.

firstdraft33

Thanks for the tip

silica wrote:

If you decide to go with a replacement, I have found a lot of nice sky photos at istockphoto.com.

I am going to play with replacing the sky tonight, I will check out istockphoto.com for sources.

cdhames

looks like a couple hours of masking treetops ahead of you. you might try running through your blending modes to see if any will allow the green of the treetops to show through and make adjustments from there.

you might also try selecting just the "white" sky through Select --> Color Range, then unselecting any white portions underneath the skyline. That may give you an easy out, and you can mask to correct any small perturbances you come across this way. Come to think of it, if it's all "true" white up there, the magic wand tool at 0 or 1 should do the same thing, and then you can mask to correct for selection errors.

nikos

firstdraft33 wrote:

I have cropped this image down a bit, but there is still some blown out sky. I am not all that great with PS, and what ever I do seems to just make the sky gray and unattractive. Plase help with any suggestions.



Thanks alot for your help, I just want to make this image as good as it can be, so any suggestions/criticism would also be appreciated.

Randall,

Easy fix in about 3 minutes


Assuming you know your way around photoshop, here's what I did in brief steps.

1. Made a quick mask by using the blue alpha channel in conjunction with the levels command to get the correct contrast and cleaned up the rest of the mask with the lasso tool.

2. Made a duplicate layer and used the edited channel to make a layer mask.

3. I replaced the black and white foreground/backround colors with dark and light blue colors sampled from the water and then rendered my own clouds (Filters/Render/Clouds).

4. I selected the entire clouds layer and used the Transform/Perspective command and the Transform/Distort command to give the clouds the correct ceiling perspective.

5. Since the clouds were a bit too contrasty, I set the layer's opacity to about 47%.

6. I also added .5 gaussian blur to the layer mask which made a nicer transition from the leaves to the sky.

HTH,
Nikos

wxwax

Nice job and very nice tutorial, nikos.