Blue Skies Lookin’ at Me
When digital cameras became popular many keen photographers picked up a useful hobby: shooting the breeze or the skies or the odd tree. In short, they began to assemble shots that they liked, purely because of their visual appeal. Many of these shots were neve even printed.
These days we face no cost for film nor for processing and printing. Digital is about as free as it can get!
But these odd, attractive shots can have a role in other photography.
Skies are the perfect example: if you have a collection of skies — dotted with clouds of course — you have an armory of shot material that can be used to liven up that special shot, spoilt only by a plain, bland, cloudless view of the heavens.
Take the image shown here of a couple sitting on a beachside seat, made with a Sanyo camera. Interesting shot, not least because of its limited colour palette, but missing that extra drama in the sky area.
First, we subjected the shot to some brightening work in software, to lift it. Then we pulled out a sky shot we had seen on a CD of stock images and loaded it up. Selecting and removing the sky area from the couple on the beach shot we then replaced it with the sky shot. The sky was felt to be a little too dramatic for the purpose so it was ‘dimmed’ before the composite image was dropped into the ‘Finished’ bin.
Tricks of the Trade
Sometimes you can help a picture with a lacklustre sky by just a little work in software; select the sky area and darken it or increase its blueness.
This is how we gave the picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (shot with an Olympus camera) a ‘push’ by selecting the blue and cyan hues in the original image and increasing their levels of saturation.
Keep looking when you’re out and about for filler shots: not only skies by seascapes as well, landscapes that stretch out to infinity. You never know when a shot can come in handy.
15 Responses to “Blue Skies Lookin’ at Me” - Add Yours
June 14th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
The idea behind this is good. But it looks strange having a mass of clouds along your horizon line.
I pulled the first clouds shot in my flickr stream and placed that over your original image. While it might not be quite as dramatic, it still looks real. Which is important if you want people to ‘believe’ your retouching.
http://img.skitch.com/20090614-x8ksmufu74rigy7ys5t8kqedtb.png
June 14th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I think that the author is a bit out of his depth in this article. In any waterscape pictures you will always find that the water is darker than the sky, so you can not add just any sky to a photo you have to match both the color and the brightness. In the first picture of the couple sitting on the beach the color match and brightness look about right, but the blue in the sky of the second picture is far too dark and in places it is darker than the sea, therefore making the scene look completely false.
In the photo of the bridge, the sky has been brightened and the hue changed, but once again the water does not reflect this change.
You have much more latitude when replacing the sky in landscape photos as long as you get the angle of the sun in roughly the same position in both photos, but when there is water in the scene you have to match hue saturation and brightness to make it look real.
June 14th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Andy is right, the first photo looks fake because of the clouds touching the horizon. His version is better.
You can also dodge and burn a sky to increase the dramatic effect.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Maybe you’re going for a surreal look on these examples, but frankly they both look very odd. I get the intent of adding some “drama” to the beach scene, but as others have said this example looks very strange.
In the second example, I think the problem of “the sky doesn’t look how I want it” is just a symptom of overall problems with color balance and exposure of the image. “Fixing” just the sky hue/saturation doesn’t do much for the rest of the image and is actually quite distracting.
-g
June 15th, 2009 at 4:18 am
In addition to the brightness problem mentioned by Peter Latham above, the first photo also has the problem of light angle. The light is hitting the clouds from a different angle than the people. IMO, this is item one to check when making composites if you don’t want them to look off. As it is, this doesn’t look right.
June 15th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
In addition to the technical questions, what about ethical questions? Photographs are very “real” to the viewer — i.e., the viewer’s intuitive reaction is that the photo depicts a situation that actually existed and was captured by the photographer. Pasting in a different sky means that this reaction is incorrect: the viewer is being fooled.
Is this ethical? I believe no, it’s not.
So if the composition has an uninteresting sky, well, that’s too bad: either live with it or come back another day. You can’t get every shot.
June 15th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Reid
Artists have been painting landscapes for centuries, moving objects to improve composition and painting in the sky that best fits their ideal vision. Is changing the sky or removing unsightly objects from an image any different. Most people do not take photos as factual representations of what they are seeing, so if they want to change things in photoshop then I do not see anything wrong with that, as long as it is done with a lot of thought behind the changes, unlike the above examples.
June 15th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Totally agree. The middle picture looks way to fake. A small distance between the clouds and the horizon would have helped. The general idea is good though. As long as it’s not photo journalism I personally don’t see anything wrong with improving an already good picture with some added skies or similar.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:14 am
The second example would probably be better if the contrast was adjusted rather then the hue/sat. I find adding a little contrast helps make things that get washed out (like bright clouds) more as you see them without the camera.
If it is being passed AS A PHOTO I see nothing wrong with changes that could be easily done in a dark room developing. However if things are being moved around or swapped out I think it should be categorized AS A PHOTO-MANIP, as it is no long a photograph, but a manipulated photograph.
June 17th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
@Peter: I think that the two mediums are different. With a painting, every reasonable viewer knows that the image presented has been interpreted through someone’s brain and perhaps manipulated. But photos “look” real, so the viewer experiences them as real, and I submit that this intuitive reaction is very hard to displace even if at an intellectual level one knows that the photo has been manipulated.
@Ruth: I agree. I’m not arguing against photo-illustrations or “photo-manips” (learn a new term every day), but it needs to be clear to the viewer what’s going on at an intuitive level as well as intellectual — or, alternatively, that fooling the viewer accomplishes a purpose. (For example, there’s an excellent photo-manip of Ahmed Ahmadinejad cowering in fear of a computer mouse in this week’s Newsweek.)
June 18th, 2009 at 7:44 am
I believe that as a photographer (not a digital artist) you deal with what is infront of you. It’s about trying making sense of a complex world and that world should not be manipulated, save for slight adjustments – levels etc. Whatever the conditions, you are experiencing the real world, and how you deal with it and interpret it is where the skill, and fun lies. Lets not dilute the purity of the image in the new digital era.
June 26th, 2009 at 4:12 am
Why even bother with picture the Newport beach picture. It has major composition issues. For any photographer it is always much better to do it right in the camera. This photographer needs to get rid of all post processing software and learn how to do it right in the first place. Once that part is mastered, then post processing would be the next step. There is no software in the world that can fix a picture that is bad to begin with. The second version has also major artifacts and noise issues. By the way, a picture with lots of trees over the horizon would have been more interesting for a sky replacement. This one is too easy. I also think that the photographer tried to clone something. There is a hard square “dip” in the horizon, just left of the bench. It is hard to see, but it is there.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Personally, I think the beach scene was beautiful the way it was. Simple. Why ruin it? I appreciate what the author was trying to show, though it could have been better. And with the Sydney picture, the sky just looks odd. It doesn’t go with the feel of the other objects in the picture. The author had a good thought going, though.
June 28th, 2009 at 12:10 am
“that world should not be manipulated, save for slight adjustments”
Interesting discussion. Everyone wants to pick the exact spot to gore the other’s ox.
Properly done, even “slight adjustments” to things like skies can make DRAMATIC differences in the what is conveyed by a photograph. Where do you draw the line between “I made what was there more clear” and “I made what was there covey what I saw/felt, even thought that’s not what was there in the original photo”? I don’t know the answer. However, the only one’s really qualified to answer the question with authority are your target audiences–and I dare say you will get different answers from different audiences.
Thanks for the brain stimulation. Now I gotta go think…
June 28th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
now a days for the models image editing .. when they working on a open area picture or natural place they change the sky colors to be kinda greeny with more contrast and less brightness .. makes the image ..really great .
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