A more dramatic sky

My brother recently commented on the fact that Ansel Adams was not only an artist behind the lens, but a master craftsman in the darkroom as well, working tirelessly on both skill sets to achieve his status as a legendary and pioneering photographer.

Digital post production is the 21st-century equivalent of Ansel’s darkroom chops, and there are myriad color processing techniques available to today’s photographer. Many of these techniques are rather advanced, of course, but there are many simple adjustments that can significantly improve the photos right off your digital camera, using basic Photoshop skills.

One of my favorite things to do with my photographs is to create a more interesting and dramatic sky (especially since I don’t shoot with a polarizer as often as I probably should), and there is a fairly simple technique to accomplish this.

Above is a photograph of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, just north of Santa Cruz, California. This is the JPEG image right off my camera, cropped to a 16:9 aspect ratio (just because). It’s a decent image, but it’s a little flat, and I’d like to punch up the sky for a more dramatic and pleasing photograph. Here’s my technique:

With my image open in Photoshop CS3, I’m going to bring up my Layers palette. I want to keep all of the color data from the original image intact, so the first thing I want to do is duplicate my Background layer by dragging it onto the “Create a new layer” icon in the Layers palette or by selecting Layers > Duplicate Layer... from the menu bar. (Click on the small screen shot at right to view it at full size.)

I want to be able to make adjustments to just the blue color of the sky without affecting the rest of my image, and one easy method for doing that is to convert my new layer to grayscale using the Black and White adjustment dialog. With my new layer selected, I go to Image > Adjustment > Black & White... to bring up the Black and White adjustment dialog. I want to make sure that I have the Preview box checked so that I can see the effect that my adjustments are having to my image. In this case, I’m only interested in affecting the sky, so I’m going to move the Blue and Cyan sliders down until I get the level of darkness and contrast that I like. In this case, since the sky was pretty light in my original image, that means cranking the Blue and Cyan sliders all the way down; this will vary from image to image. Now I’ll click OK to save that adjustment to my new layer. Now my image looks like this:

Now that I have darkened and increased the contrast of the sky on my grayscale layer, I want to blend this new data with my original color image. I’ll do this by setting the Color Mode of my grayscale layer to Luminosity, using the pull-down menu at the top left of the Layers palette. This blends the light characteristics of the grayscale layer with the color data of the Background layer, resulting in a nice, darker and more dramatic sky. Notice that the coloring of the lighthouse remains unaffected, which is why this method is superior to just darkening the whole top half of the image.

(Since my grayscale image is floating on a separate layer, I have a great degree of flexibility in controlling exactly how much of the effect I want to incorporate, simply by changing the opacity of the grayscale layer, which can be changed at any stage of the process. The effect will be much more subtle at 50% opacity, for example. In this case, I'm going to keep the grayscale layer at 100% opacity for a full implementation of the darkened-sky effect.)

Now my image looks like this:

Much more dramatic, but there are several things I don’t like about this result: I don’t like the way the ocean looks so much darker now; I don’t like the artifacts at the border of land and sea along the left side of the image; and I don’t like the dark green color of the vegetation at the bottom of my image. To fix these problems, I’m going to make a gradient mask so that my dark sky effect fades out nicely as it reaches the ocean’s horizon. With my grayscale layer selected, I’m going to add a mask to that layer by clicking on the “Add layer mask” button in the Layers palette.

With the layer mask selected on my grayscale layer, I’m going to fill the mask with a simple default gradient so that the blue sky effect fades at the horizon line. With my foreground color set to White and my background color set to Black, I’m going to grab the gradient tool (by pressing the g key or selecting it from the Tools palette) and I’m going to draw a simple vertical gradient (holding the Shift key to constrain my gradient to a straight line). I want to draw a fairly short gradient line, starting from about one-third the distance between the horizon and the bottom of my image, and dragging the gradient tool straight up to about one-third the distance between the horizon and the top of my image. You can draw this gradient onto the mask as many times as you like until you get it just right. With the gradient applied to my mask now, only the top half of my image has the dark sky effect applied, and the transition from the sky to the horizon is nice and smooth, thanks to the gradient mask. This is what my final image looks like:

And the “before and after”:

Comments

[Ishmael]

Really nice tutorial - very easy to follow, and produces a very nice effect.

[David Dugan]

Thank you, Ishmael. I hope the technique comes in handy for you.