Blue Sky Action

[Souwalker]

Is there an action to replace a grey sky to a blue one?
Thanks
Patrick

[rammy]

Not that I know of because the edge of the sky, that hits the foreground is hard to define (or have an action that guesses). You might be able to get (or make) a "general action" that creates a blue gradient from the top and then have to edit the mask later.

[Souwalker]

Would there then be some tutorial on how to replace a grey sky to a blue one?
Thanks
Pat

[stathunter]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkElm_7A2Ec

[Damo77]

The best starting point is to loosely select the sky and add Cyan to Neutrals in Selective Color. That gets you in the ballpark, and you can add gradients etc from there.

The advantage is, you don't need to do any masking at all. It doesn't work for every photo, of course.

[rammy]

Would there then be some tutorial on how to replace a grey sky to a blue one?
Thanks
Pat

There are so many ways of doing it that just one tutorial wouldn't cover it unfortunately as it depends on the kind of detail and effect you are looking for. It also depends on your PS abilities too. For example, a few techniques on how to replace a "white sky" would include:

If you can recover some of the sky detail:
1. Use your RAW file to bring back the sky and do a digital blend
2. Use a levels adjustment layer and adjust for the sky then mask it
3. Do bracketed shots out in the field and perform a digital blend
4. Select the sky with the magic wand and do a curves adjustment layer
5. Same as 4. but do a Brightness/Contrast adjustment instead

If you can't recover detail from the sky:
1. Magic wand select the sky and use the linear gradient tool to add some blue
2. Drag and drop another sky shot and mask over your existing sky
3. Same as 2. expect use the magic wand tool to create a selection, feather it and make a copy of the new sky to put over the "bad" one.
4. Do a Select | Colour range and click on the sky with an appropriate fuzziness. Then add a Hue/Saturation/luminance (HSL) layer and colorize the sky
5. Use the Pen Tool to create a precise selection of the sky edge (I do this with buildings sometimes) and save the selection. You can then load the selection and do adjustments on the sky as well as inverse it and do adjustments on the foreground.

You can also mix and match the techniques and I am sure there are loads of others.

Sorry no links, unfortunately don't have time to search for any or make up some tutorials so see if you can find a decent one or make one yourself :-)

[Road2Show]

You didn't say if this was for PS or Lightroom, or ?

I've been using these Jack Davis lightroom presets with great results;
http://www.ononesoftware.com/photopresets-wow.php