Recovering skies

Hi all,

In the RAW conversions thread, I see people manage to recover nearly-blown skies into dramatically-colored images. I was wondering if you'd have some pointers as to which sliders to play with as I often end up with either sort of flattish skies, or obviously over-the-top colors. I assume most of it is the photographer's eye, but I'm wondering if there are any specific tools I should really know about (for instance, I recently discovered the luminance sliders, and those helped massively).

Using ACR 6.3 by the way. Thanks!

Recovery slider and luminance will help a lot, and you can also use the gradient adjustments with negative exposure and brightness settings to taste. Maybe add a little color to that if you have skies that are completely blown out. If that fails, well in PS you can always insert your own sky which I've done from time time.

armis wrote in post #14659336
Hi all,

In the RAW conversions thread, I see people manage to recover nearly-blown skies into dramatically-colored images. I was wondering if you'd have some pointers as to which sliders to play with as I often end up with either sort of flattish skies, or obviously over-the-top colors. I assume most of it is the photographer's eye, but I'm wondering if there are any specific tools I should really know about (for instance, I recently discovered the luminance sliders, and those helped massively).

Using ACR 6.3 by the way. Thanks!

In that thread, you see examples of what can be done with Raw conversions -- are you looking for more? Much more can be done with Photoshop, things like replacing entire backgrounds -- is that what you're asking about?

tonylong wrote in post #14659451
In that thread, you see examples of what can be done with Raw conversions -- are you looking for more? Much more can be done with Photoshop, things like replacing entire backgrounds -- is that what you're asking about?

In the thread, most people use Lightroom. While that's mostly identical to ACR, some sliders are different and, I don't know, maybe some stuff works differently. Plus, of course, I don't have the same RAWs to begin with so maybe it's something in my photo technique. Regardless, I'm never as happy with my results as I wish I were, compared to what's in that thread. I'm just trying to figure out why, but I don't have much to go on except "I can't seem do it". But no, I'm not looking to replace the backgrounds entirely.

Maybe if you post a "Before" shot and then use a service like YouSendIt.com to upload and post a link to your Raw file people could take a whack at it?

ND Grad feature of LR helps a lot. (You can get colored ND grad too)
Don't know equivalent in ACR.

If you have CS6, as far as I know it will have the same controls as LR4, although layout is different. The LR Develop panels/sliders are all found in the ACR tabs. The brushes, cropping, spot removal, red-eye and gradient tools would be found in the top toolbar, above the image preview.

Earlier versions of CS/ACR will be compatible with earlier versions of LR. So, CS5 ACR will be compatible with LR3, and so on.

I have attached a couple of screen grabs from LR 4.1 that show you what sliders I have used. The actual picture is not great but it shows what can be achieved very quickly in LR/ACR. The only things that have been done are the sliders that you can see and Colour NR at 5/50 and sharpening 50/1.0/25/95. Remove CA is also ticked.

Alan

Thanks for the sample BigAl. I see something a lot when I look at the RAW conversions thread. On quite a few of the conversions, people take the highlights to -100 and the shadows to +100. Is this generally done on files that are overexposed? Maybe overexposed is the wrong word. Maybe on photos that are lacking detail is a better description. The results are almost always great but making such radical adjustments always seems counter intuitive to me for some reason.

DaveSt wrote in post #14670518
Thanks for the sample BigAl. I see something a lot when I look at the RAW conversions thread. On quite a few of the conversions, people take the highlights to -100 and the shadows to +100. Is this generally done on files that are overexposed? Maybe overexposed is the wrong word. Maybe on photos that are lacking detail is a better description. The results are almost always great but making such radical adjustments always seems counter intuitive to me for some reason.

When I shoot outdoors daylight scenes (which is most of the time) and it's a bright cloudy day, I have to do a "balancing act" with my exposure -- I try to get a "decent" exposure for my subjects/foreground while avoiding the problem of totally blowing out the sky.

It's not a matter of "overexposing" vs "underexposing" -- that infers that there is one "good" exposure that will not need post-processing. But if you just took that shot in jpeg out-of-the-camera, the camera will "throw away" either highlight detail or shadow detail or both, and the results can be, well, less than satisfactory, at least to someone like me who treasures all the detail I can get!

For example, a cloudy sky should come out as a cloudy sky even when It's important for me to get a "good" photo of people (or animals or whatever). But so often you can't get both with the out-of-camera jpeg.

That's where Raw comes in, because you really can get a lot out of your shot that would otherwise be lost.

And, I believe that some real strides have been made in the area. With LR4, I find that I can just use a "template" -- I can set the Highlights slider to -100, the Shadows slider to whatever is appropriate, and just go to town on a whole set of photos where my sky comes out nice and detailed. The other controls (Exposure, Contrast, etc) fit in as well.

tonylong wrote in post #14660486
Maybe if you post a "Before" shot and then use a service like YouSendIt.com to upload and post a link to your Raw file people could take a whack at it?

Well, here are 3 example shots. I'll post the jpegs with just the highlights recovered if anyone wants to take a quick stab, and I'll post links to the RAWs below.

The first one, I wonder how you get the dramatic balanced colors that say 'sunrise': Link
As for the second one, I'm wondering how I'm to turn that pink-gray smudge into a proper sky: Link

Hope I'm not breaking any rules by posting the two, and will take down excess if I am.

armis, are these your files/photos? If so you aren't breaking any rules.

I just got in with 399 photos to go through and work on from an event, so won't be able to get to these, maybe some others can mess with them since I'll be busy for quite a while!

tonylong wrote in post #14671720
armis, are these your files/photos? If so you aren't breaking any rules.

Oh yeah, of course they're mine (if I'd wanted to lift stuff from someone else, I'd've grabbed better pics ). I just keep forgetting how many images I can post where, so I included a disclaimer.

Dave with the Aviation pictures it is a very high contrast situation. You have the aircraft and often I am exposing for the Shadows on that, which leaves very little room for the sky. Personally I always expose for what I want to capture in detail, which means leaving the sky to take care of itself. The new controls that are available in LR4 though just make this so easy. Sometimes you can even pull out what looks like an HDR type shot as you can bring what would otherwise be lost as shadow right up. Of course bringing the shadows up like that can introduce serious noise even at ISO 100. Knowing how well LR4 can then pull that down means that I can push the exposure especially when there are no real highlight issues on the SUBJECT, If the sky dose blow out then there are other ways that I can deal with it, including putting another one in altogether or just using a gradient fill layer in a suitable colour later in PS. There is usually at least a little variation even when large parts of the sky are blown, so using say Darken as the blend mode with a gradient fill gives a very realistic effect.

Alan