How do I make sure blue skies come out blue, and not white?!

[Bianconero]

Hi All

I'm finding that often when taking shots with my DSLR, even though the sky is blue, when I take the photo it appears white! I think it may have something to do with the point of focus. Here is an example of what I'm talking about.



In this photo, the subject and focus point is the boat. You can see from the reflection in the water, that the sky was blue that day, but as you can see, it appears white in the photo. Is it over exposed? If I take a picture and focus on the sky itself, then it is correctly shown in the photo in blue. But as you know, when taking shots like these, you cant focus on the sky, you have to focus on the subject (the boat, in this case).

I understand that there are ways of fixing this in photoshop (which i still have to learn), but I was wondering if there was something I can do on the camera itself when shooting to fix this, or at least give it a hint of blue so that it's just a case of increasing the saturation of the sky in photoshop, rather than spending more time replacing the sky completely. Possibly the aperture, white balance or metering could help?

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated as it's really frustrating me and in some cases, spoiling my shots

[clockdoc]

Much of your photo is made up of darker tones. You camera meter is taking this into consideration and exposing accordingly. This tends to over expose the sky washing the color out of it. The color of the sky also varies with time of day and direction in which you are shooting with respect to the position of the sun. Two things that may help here are a graduated neutral density filter or a polarizing filter. Again, the effect of the polarizing filter depends on the direction you are shooting with respect to the sun.
Since it is impossible to get detail in a blown highlight area, you may want to deliberately underexpose the whole scene and then selectively lighten those areas of the image that need it in Photoshop or similar software.

[Aperture Nine]

Whatever you do it will never beat a circular polarizing filter. I didn't believe my eyes when I checked the results on my laptop. It will also enhance your colours quite a bit.

Also, shoot in RAW. The default contrast curves applied to JPG's can destroy the image further.

[kirbinster]

The other thing you can do is shoot two or three shots at different exposures - one to get the sky right and then another one or two to get the darks and midtones. Then you can combine them as an HDR to get everything perfect.

[pilothaz]

Originally Posted by kirbinster

The other thing you can do is shoot two or three shots at different exposures - one to get the sky right and then another one or two to get the darks and midtones. Then you can combine them as an HDR to get everything perfect.

Yes, but then does he not have to make sure he is shooting in RAW to get the most benefits out of that?

[HockeyFan]

A graduated nd filter will help with this.

[WooD]

I always use PS. Just a one minute edit.

[Hugo]

Exif data? Spot-metering? Any additional info may be able to help with some suggestions for getting less blown out pics out of the camera therefore requiring less photoshop fixing.

[ditch_azeroth]

to make sure you get the clouds and stuff, you might want to try narrower apertures - and then you compensate later with exposure, iso and flash - flash being the preferred compensation. also, spot metering on lighter areas of your subject might help.

[Bianconero]

Originally Posted by ditch_azeroth

to make sure you get the clouds and stuff, you might want to try narrower apertures - and then you compensate later with exposure, iso and flash - flash being the preferred compensation. also, spot metering on lighter areas of your subject might help.

All the EXIF data is on my flickr page if somebody wants to take a look and see what could have been improved . Just click on the pic and it will take you there.

In terms of spot metering, I'm not really sure how this works. Can somebody provide more info on this