Graham @ Auchmithie - how do I fix the sky?

Took these at Auchmithie Harbour, near Arbroath, yesterday, Very cold indeed! but no matter how I tried the sky still came out all washed out! How do I fix this? help!!
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There are times Eileen when nothing short of a good dose of Photoshop to sort 'that' sort of sky. With photoshop you can open up the lower half of the picture to bring in more detail and hopefully find some detail in the sky, if all else fails you can cheat and use a sky from elsewhere or better still taken at a different time at the same place.

Try shooting in manual, and expose for the sky and under expose by half a stop. That should leave some detail in the sky ad you can bring the foreground out in post processing.

If you would prefer to shoot the sky without it blowing out (and don't want to have to use PP afterwards) you could always invest in a Neutral Density Filter. The ND filter is graduated and allows less light into the camera, therefore the sky does not become over-exposed and, due to the graduation, the foreground is still exposed correctly.

As GH has said, you could invest in an ND filter. I will be as soon as funds allow

If you don't have one of these then i would expose for the ground and then expose for the sky and merge them together.

Alternatively you could "fake it" by using a sky from another image you have taken in the past or use a free stock sky....

Thanks everyone, Will look into the filter, as I'm not that good in photoshop!!

Gone back and looked at the shots again and it is a shame about the sky because they would have been very nice particularly the first which I really like, the figure in the foreground and the slightly milky look of the rocks make for a very nice image.

elieen.. yes it is a shame about the sky but i think theses portraits of a photographer at work is fab !
i agree with GH too and go for ND filters

One thing with grads iirc is that your choice of apeture can sometimes cause a very obvious line where the grad starts and finishes, can someone explain this better than me please, know what I mean just cant express properly

You have to have something there in the first place - without such, no amount of grad filtration is going to put something in the sky that wasn't there to start with. by using a grad against a featureless sky you will simply have a plain grey grad sky.

There are a number of ways of capturing strongly contrasting featres in camera for example by those already described and also by bracketing your exposure and building a layered image.

Alternatively you can add interest in PS. I have included two very different methods to illustrate what can be simply achieved in minutes.



this was done by adding a user defined bi-colour filter in CS3 and just adjusting it to suit.



this one was PP'd by adding another sky image into the existing 'empty' sky.

the method: Open the original image and the one you want to take the sky from. Using the lasso tool select the empty sky and refine the edges and smoothness of your selection.
Select the 'new' sky and 'paste into' your exisiting old sky. in layers, select 'Darker' and hey presto... job done.

I hope this helps