Quick Tips to Enhance Blue Skies
Ian PlantHave you often photographed a landscape and the sky doesn’t come out as blue as you’d hoped for? In this free video, world renowned outdoor photographer Ian Plant travels to Lake Superior and shows you how to enhance the blue in your skies. He suggests you avoid the standard solution of polarizing filters because those filters will often result in uneven blues in the sky.
Polarizing filters can also make the blues in the overall image look unnatural. For his sky images, Ian leaves the polarizing filter off the lens and makes the color adjustment when he is processing the RAW file in Adobe Lightroom. To use this technique, go into the HSL module, choose the Luminance tab, and darken the blues in your photograph. The result? A beautiful deep blue sky.
I'm Ian Plant and, right now, I'm photographing the beautiful North shore of Lake superior in Minnesota of the United States. And I've bet you've heard this one before. I bet you've been told that if you want to deepen the color of a blue sky, use a polarizer filter. And you will notice when you use a polarizer filter with a shot that includes a blue sky, as you turn the polarizer, indeed, the sky does go a much darker, richer shade of blue. Just remember how a polarizer filter works.
The amount of polarization increases, as you approach an angle of shooting that's 90 degrees away from the sun. So, if you are working with a wide angle lens and you are including lots of sky, that angle of view necessarily is going to include parts of the sky that are not 90 degrees away from the sun. And the end result may be pretty significant uneven polarization of the sky, where some parts of the sky are much darker blue than others. And this is not very attractive. Another negative effect of using a polarizer filter is it can create a very significant change to the color and tone of the blues in an image.
And it doesn't always look very natural. So, instead of using a polarizer filter to darken a blue sky I leave the filter off the lens and, instead, I make a selective color adjustment when I'm processing the raw file using Adobe Lightroom. And it's pretty simple, you just go into the HSL module, you select the luminance tab, and then you can darken the blues and only the blues in the photo. And this allows you to avoid that uneven polarized look and you can fine tune the amount of polarization, the amount of darkening of the blue sky that you want to have in the image, and therefore create a more natural look to your photos. So, there you have it, getting a rich but natural looking polarization effect for your blue sky images is really easy using Adobe Lightroom.
I'm Ian Plant and thanks for watching.
I shoot film so post processing is out for me unfortunately....
I would love to enhance the blue sky in my captures without distorting the rest of the capture
And if you don't have Adobe Lightroom, let alone HSL module?