Amazing Skies tutorial

[MartinBabies]

Amazing skies
Photo editing tutorial by Rabieshund

Have you ever tried to include sky in one of your photographs? Did it turn out white, just totally blown? Skies often do, as the camera measures light in a different way than our eyes.
There is one way to get around this though, without using any filters.

For this tutorial you need:

- A camera that can shoot in RAW format. If you have no clue what RAW format is, then take a look http://www.photos-of-the-year.com/raw/]here.
- RAW editing and convertion software. I'm using RawShooter Essentials 2006. The program have to be able to change the exposure of your RAW files.
- Photomatix. High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging software.
- Photoshop

There are trial versions of all the above programs. I think you still can find the free version of RawShooter Essentials on the internet. Just try to google it and you shall find.
The trial version of Photomatix is pretty limited though and it puts a watermark on the pictures you process.

What we are going to do in this tutorial is similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDRI]HDR, but we will not get a 32-bit image as we will never get more dynamic range than 16-bit.
We will however use Photomatix to create a "fake HDR" where we bring out the sky and blend exposures.

1. Taking the photo

On a cloudy day, take your beloved camera, find something interesting and take a photo.
Make sure your camera is set to RAW mode. Include alot of sky! It doesn't matter if the sky turns out really bright. That's what we're gonna fix in the following steps. Though, do not overexposure the ground or the sky might be hard to save. So, not too bright!

Here in my shot I have actually underexposed the ground a little. Is not extremely necessary to do that, but I wanted to be sure I don't end up with any overexposed parts when I edit the picture later. Too much light is simply too much light.




2. Opening the RAW file

Open up your RAW file in your RAW editing software. It will probably not look as good as you imagined. At least, mine didn't, but that doesn't matter.
Save your RAW file untouched as a 16-bit TIFF file. Now to the smart part.

Play around with the settings for your image. Create a brighter image that looks like a longer exposure.

Settings:

Exposure compensation
3.00
Fill Light
10
Noise suppression
100
Color noise suppression
60



And now do the same thing, but create a darker image where you concentrate on the sky. You can see my settings and result below.

Settings:

Exposure compensation
-3.00
Shadow contrast
52
Highlight contrast
64




3. Merging the exposures

Now that we have three different exposures of the same image, it's time to actually do something with them.
Open up Photomatix and go HDR > Generate. Browse for you three exposures and click OK. Wait for it to load.
You will end up with an image with extreme contrasts. This is where the magic comes in.
Go to HDR > Tone Mapping.

This opens up a new window with lots of fun stuff. Play around with each one of the controls to see what it does. But in the end, try to get an image without too much contrast.

Settings:

Strength: 100
Color Saturation: 59
Light Smoothing: 2
Luminosity: 10
Micro-smoothing: 30
White Clip: 5,000%
Black Clip: 1,365%
Output bit-depth: 8-bit (This is just to save some disc space. A 16-bit TIFF image takes up almost 50 mb for me.)

Save your image as a new file.




4. Photoshop work

In Photoshop we will work with contrasts, color and all that stuff. So open the "HDR" photo.
This part is entirely up to you. I will of course go through my editing, but it could be very different from yours.

1. I started by duplicating the layer and lift some shadows by going Image > Shadows/Highlights. Then I masked the sky so that this would only affect the ground.
2. I added a Curves layer and enhanced the contrasts. I masked the ground get only the sky.
3. Did the same thing, but with the ground and no sky. I did this in two layers because I simply wanted different contrasts on sky and ground.
4. I created a new layer on top of everything and took a black to transparent gradient to darken the sky a little. I set the layer to Soft Light and lowered the exposure.
5. Created some slight vinjetting by doing the same thing with the ground, on a new layer.
6. The image was very blue-ish, so I created a Hue/Saturation layer, selected the blues in the sky and simply lowered the Saturation for them a little.



Another example:



There you have it. See that's not very hard at all. You can easily do this in 3-5 minutes when you know the technique. Hope you liked the tutorial!

[Henry]

Wow, very sexy :O
Will definitely try this when i get more space for my computer.

How is the RAW editing in photoshop?

[VoodooGypsy]

Martin gots skills!
Seems like it would be easy to follow. Nice outcome too.
I'm a loser and don't have a camera, but getting one for my trip to Australia...maybe I will try this when I get back.

[Sushi]

Sweet can't wait to try it. great tut.

[MartinBabies]

Wow, very sexy :O
Will definitely try this when i get more space for my computer.

How is the RAW editing in photoshop?

I recently bought a new harddrive just for storing photos. Grrreat!

Since I don't use CS2, I have no clue how Bridge is. At least I think Bridge can view RAW files? Right? :S But I would rather use Lightroom or something else.

Martin gots skills!
Seems like it would be easy to follow. Nice outcome too.
I'm a loser and don't have a camera, but getting one for my trip to Australia...maybe I will try this when I get back.

Thanks!
Hope you buy one. I think Canon 300D is really cheap now, so maybe that is an option?

Sweet can't wait to try it. great tut.

Thanks man.