Very often you may photograph a dramatic sky but when the image is straight out of camera, you look at it and think, I know the sky looked way more interesting that that!

Example!

Dramatic Sky not as dramatic as it should be

Camera Raw to the Rescue

This can, thankfully, be rectified very easily in Adobe Camera Raw. There are a couple of ways of doing this. Today I’m going to concentrate on one using the Gradient tool.

As you saw above the dramatic sky isn’t as dramatic as it should be. So we open up the image in Raw. We choose the Gradient tool (hit G or click the fourth icon from the right from the options along the top), then click and drag down.

We then adjust the settings on the right hand side. The main ones to play with are:

• the Exposure – this will darken it down when you pull the slider to the left.
• the Clarity – this is ‘micro-contrast’ which helps bring out details when pushed to the right (or softens details when pulled to the left.
• the Dehaze tool – this does what it says on the tin and will reduce haze when you push the slider to the right (or bring more haze back in when you pull the slider to the left) upping the contrast and the saturation accordingly.
• the Highlights – where there is a lot of blown outness (new word I just invented) – ie, where there is a lot of sun blowing out the highlights, then pulling the Highlights slider to the left can help bring these back. Be careful not to overdo it as it can go grey.
• the Shadows – this will lighten up the shadows where they may be too dark (pull to the right).

Showing the gradient tool bringing in the details of the dramatic sky

Don’t forget, even if you take a picture on your camera phone or other device, you can still get to the Raw settings by opening it up in Photoshop and going to Filter > Camera Raw Filter.

So, is this cheating?

Absolutely not. As we’ve talked about in a number of other posts, a camera gives an average exposure, (usually weighted towards the centre). This will darken down the whole image dramatically so when you lighten up your exposure in your camera to see the detail in the foreground, this is usually at the expense of a dramatic sky. All we’re doing here is bringing the image back to how you saw it originally. See this before and after tutorial of how we used Camera Raw

Drag the centre line to see the difference

The post The Elusive Dramatic Sky and How to Retrieve Using Camera Raw appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Queen Caroline’s Temple is a classical style summer house overlooking the Long Water, east of Lancaster Walk in Hyde Park, London. When I saw it at sunset I envisaged a beautiful temple with all the detail of the brick work against a blue winter sky. You can see this is not what the original Raw file shows.

Drag the line in the middle to see the before and after image.

Let us see what we can do to fix it.

The Image that I originally created appears to be under exposed. It’s not that this was an error on my part. I deliberately chose this exposure so I could get some detail in the bright area of the sky as I knew I could pull back detail from the shadows. It’s so much harder to get detail from the highlights as once its gone it’s gone. For those used to shooting film it’s like using transparency – shoot for the shadow.

As you can see from the image sequence below I open the image in the raw file converter (similar setting can be done in Lightroom). Why do I use Bridge and not Lightroom? Well I do a lot of work in Adobe Illustrator and Indesign as well as AfterEffects and Bridge works with all these formats. I will do a separate post about the pros/cons of each bit of software.

Original image in raw direct from camera

Straighten Image verticals

My first area to work on is to fix verticals, horizontals and perspective. I then crop the image to the correct ratio.

Crop image

Set up basic lightness and colour balance

Next is to sort out the lightness and darkness of the entire image. I use exposure and shadow and highlights sliders for this. Next comes contrast. I do use curves (not pictured here. I will do an entire post on using curves soon.)but also a lot of micro-contrast called clarity. Next comes colour correction. This needs to be done after sorting out your lightness/darkness as its easiest to correct colour on a well exposed image. I add vibrancy and saturation after this if it needs it.

Use adjustment brush to augment areas

I then go into the adjustment brushes and adjust any areas I think need it. For you traditional film photographers this is like your dodging andd burning stage but with so many more options. You can see how I brought back detail in the building and increased the saturation and contrast in these ares. I did saturation/vibrance and contrast/clarity as these are usually lost in the darker areas of an image.

I finally keep this as raw file so I can always edit it later.

The post Photographing Queen Caroline’s Temple in Hyde Park, London appeared first on ImageExplorers.