Another CPOL question

Turnerea

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I had posted this thought on the other CPOL thread, but didn't want to completely hijack it.

I often find that when out in the field I want to darken my sky and make the clouds stand out, while also saturating colors. So... using CPOL seems obvious. I've found that adjusting the polarizer to make the sky as dark as possible looks good in the field, but very overpowering and hard to correct on the computer. Here's an example, with the sun at what looks like just about 90 degrees judging by the shadows here:

4033059682_da8108f4ec_b_d.jpg


I liked the CPOL here for saturating the colors a bit and helping to darken up the sky, but it looks unnatural to me. Not exactly too dark, just a weird coloring almost. I've tried messing with the luminance and saturation of the blue channel in lightroom to no avail. I have not yet tried adjusting the blue channel in curves in PS... but my main question is this:

Does anyone else run into this? I guess the easy solution is just to NOT adjust the polarizer to its max effect, but that is sometimes easy to forget when it looks decent through the viewfinder.
 
You could take multiple photos with different polarizer positions, then just choose your favorite later.
 
Yeah, I've been finding the max point on the filter then backing off about an eighth to a sixteenth of a turn and that seems to be the sweet spot for sky/cloud/saturation.
 
Exactly I mentioned this in the other thread. A polariser is not an On/Off effect. Don't turn it all the way and you may get a bit of glistening back in your foliage and some light back in the sky.
 

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