What to do with overcast sky?

anderiv

My wife and I were out and about in Minneapolis yesterday evening, and I got a chance to take a few pictures from the observation deck of the Mill City Museum, which overlooks St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi. It was a hazy, overcast day to begin with...not optimal shooting conditions.

Take this picture:


I pulled it into PS, fixed the tilt of the picture, and set the black and white points. Obviously, I couldn't be as aggressive with setting the white point as I normally am, as the sky would blow out quite easily. This is the best I could come up with:



It's better than the original, but still not great. Would the next step be to mask off the overcast sky and then perform further adjustments on the rest of the picture?

I'm just starting to learn about post-processing, so I could use some pointers on this. Thanks!

slapshot

Have you thought about converting this to black & white? I think this photo would look very nice in BW.

I don't think there is much else you can do with the sky. If you mask it and make substantial changes to the sky, it will probably start looking un-natural vs the rest of the shot. You may want to consider cropping the photo to take away some of the sky.

Also could probably use more local contrast to get some "pop"

DavidTO

First, the bad news. What to do about the sky? Don't shoot a picture that features so much boring sky. .

And you've got a big goober in the upper left quadrant.

Now, what can you do to make this shot better? Well, first off, there's no reason why you can't set black and white points as you normally would. Then you can follow it up by steepening the RGB curve to add contrast to the important parts of the curve.

What I did after that was to go to LAB and use the Man from mars technique.

What do you think? I think I probably went just a little to far with the MFM approach, but you get the idea.

rutt

David is basically right, lost a lot when you overexposed the sky. Or it was boring in the first place. I like David's idea of moving to LAB to enhance color and contrast. But I started off with a technique I've been using more since Dan's PP5E came out: a false profile (see PP5E, ch. 15, unfortunately no summary yet.)



I started by duplicating the image and using Edit->Assign Profile to assign to Wide Gamut RGB. But not just any Wide Gamut RGB, but an edited version with gamut 3.0. The result of this move is much darker and more colorful than the original. I then converted back to sRGB and copied onto a layer on the orginal. Then I could use the blend-if sliders to exclude everything but the sky from the blend. With sliders split pretty wide, I recovered a lot of sky detail and added color to the highlights.

From there on, pretty conventional. Covert to LAB. Flatten. Use the standard LAB canyon technique, pushing A a little toward the warm and B toward the cool to get neutral highlights in the clouds.

Use Edgework's inverted K channel mask L curve trick to get nice shadows.

Sharpen twice, HIRALOAM and conventional on separate layers and blend.

Done.

So I got real light and dark points without blowing the sky. Perhaps I went to far, but that's always a danger with these blown out skies, especially landscapes, because the light was really different from the light you are trying to portray.

Another thing to consider is to use some variant of the impossible retouch to blend in a better sky. If you do this, though, you really have to have a light hand, because it's easy for that to look fake for the same reason I mentioned above.

SitterS

First let me say that I know these clouds do not really fit this photo. I found a tutorial earlier in the week on Russell Brown's site on how to add clouds to a gray sky. I didn't have a photo then to play with so when I saw this one I thought I would use it to try the tutorial. You had to have a picture with clouds to copy and paste from and I only had one to use.

Thought I would convert to BW with the clouds added to see what it looked like. Oh well...it was fun playing anyway. \

Shane

richtersl

Hi Erik,

I thought I'd take a stab at this during lunch. I was able to bring the sky out a bit more with Photoshop Elements. Here's what I did:

1. Duplicated the background layer and applied the Shadow/Highlight tool to it to brighten it a bit.
2. Cloned out your goober.
3. Added a Hue/Saturation Layer and boosted the master saturation setting.
4. Added a Levels layer to tweak the contrast a bit.
5. Add a gradient gray-colored Fill Layer to to sky and set the Blending Mode to Color Burn. Left the opacity at 100%. That came out a bit dark originally, so I adjusted that layer by de-selecting Align With Layer and moving the gradient up so that the extreme dark portion was out of the picture.

Attached is the result.