How depth of field affects the sky

[in2thewild]

Hi,
My question on the photo below regards the sky. When I tried to edit it in Lightroom and make it blue (because it's boring right now) it wouldn't let me. The sky was a little dusty so I'm wondering whether if I adjusted my depth of field, this would have allowed me to capture more detail in the sky?

This photo was taken in Saudi Arabia. The sky is always dusty so I'm trying to figure out how to capture the detail under these lighting circumstances!

Or if you have any other comments about the photo, they're welcome also.

Thanks

 

[JamesScott86]

Beautiful shot - so pretty too.

 

[John Hunt]

Try the remove haze slider in lightroom.

 

[in2thewild]

Beautiful shot - so pretty too.

Thanks!

 

[in2thewild]

Try the remove haze slider in lightroom.

Thanks, I'll try that!

 

[weepete]

Depth of field just determines how much of your shot is in focus, (I think of it as a "slice" of focus that is at 90° to the direction you are pointing your lens. It can be any thickness from less than 1" to miles, and sometimes infinite) so wont have affected the detail in your sky unless you have shot at far too wide an aperture and focused on something close which would likely have thrown the whole background of the shot out of focus.

Forcing colour into a scene can be tricky, often it doesn't work and looks obviously pushed in post. Saying that I'd probably try to even up the gradient in the sky a bit using the gradient filters in lightroom. The photo looks like it comtains a lot of yellow, that may have thrown your white balance off a bit, so adjusting the white balance to contain less yellow might bring out the blues a bit more. If that still isn't to your satisfaction then I sometimes bump the luminance of the blues up a bit in the HSL panel.

Ultimatley though, contrast helps resolve detail and if there's vey little contrast in the sky it will be pale and lacking detail. There's a couple of photographic things we can do about this though. A circular polarizer will bring out colours a bit, boost the contrast in a sky and cut down on reflections at the expense of a stop or two. A GND filter can help retain detail in the sky by selectivley darkening it so often helps in order to not "blow out" clouds and the like

 

[in2thewild]

Depth of field just determines how much of your shot is in focus, (I think of it as a "slice" of focus that is at 90° to the direction you are pointing your lens. It can be any thickness from less than 1" to miles, and sometimes infinite) so wont have affected the detail in your sky unless you have shot at far too wide an aperture and focused on something close which would likely have thrown the whole background of the shot out of focus.

Forcing colour into a scene can be tricky, often it doesn't work and looks obviously pushed in post. Saying that I'd probably try to even up the gradient in the sky a bit using the gradient filters in lightroom. The photo looks like it comtains a lot of yellow, that may have thrown your white balance off a bit, so adjusting the white balance to contain less yellow might bring out the blues a bit more. If that still isn't to your satisfaction then I sometimes bump the luminance of the blues up a bit in the HSL panel.

Ultimatley though, contrast helps resolve detail and if there's vey little contrast in the sky it will be pale and lacking detail. There's a couple of photographic things we can do about this though. A circular polarizer will bring out colours a bit, boost the contrast in a sky and cut down on reflections at the expense of a stop or two. A GND filter can help retain detail in the sky by selectivley darkening it so often helps in order to not "blow out" clouds and the like

Thanks, I'll try those techniques in Lightroom and see what happens.

Maybe I'll need to use a polariser a lot here because the sky is usually dusty and grainy.

 

[Tim Tucker]

Depth of field does not really affect the sky. The sky can be assumed to be at infinity so any distant landscape will have the sky in acceptable focus. Besides clouds are normally soft anyway.

What affects the sky is the sky itself, as in the lighting and the type of clouds. What you have here is high level hazy cloud. It will never look like side lit cumulus and will always be obscured by distant haze.

I would agree with weepete's advice, and use either a polariser or a graduated ND filter.

But first and foremost the most important thing for contrast is difference. If your colour balance is off then you have a colour cast and you have already lost some of contrast between colour that would make things stand out more. So before you do anything else edit the WB.

 

[in2thewild]

Depth of field does not really affect the sky. The sky can be assumed to be at infinity so any distant landscape will have the sky in acceptable focus. Besides clouds are normally soft anyway.

What affects the sky is the sky itself, as in the lighting and the type of clouds. What you have here is high level hazy cloud. It will never look like side lit cumulus and will always be obscured by distant haze.

I would agree with weepete's advice, and use either a polariser or a graduated ND filter.

But first and foremost the most important thing for contrast is difference. If your colour balance is off then you have a colour cast and you have already lost some of contrast between colour that would make things stand out more. So before you do anything else edit the WB.

View attachment 117826

Wow, that looks much better - thanks. OK, so the white balance gives more ' colour ' to my clouds? Great advice - thanks.

What do you think about the composition in this photo? I wasn't sure about it.

 

[in2thewild]

Depth of field does not really affect the sky. The sky can be assumed to be at infinity so any distant landscape will have the sky in acceptable focus. Besides clouds are normally soft anyway.

What affects the sky is the sky itself, as in the lighting and the type of clouds. What you have here is high level hazy cloud. It will never look like side lit cumulus and will always be obscured by distant haze.

I would agree with weepete's advice, and use either a polariser or a graduated ND filter.

But first and foremost the most important thing for contrast is difference. If your colour balance is off then you have a colour cast and you have already lost some of contrast between colour that would make things stand out more. So before you do anything else edit the WB.

View attachment 117826

Wow, that looks much better - thanks. OK, so the white balance gives more ' colour ' to my clouds? Great advice - thanks.

What do you think about the composition in this photo? I wasn't sure about it.

I have a circular polarizer but the problem is I bought it for the lens that came with my camera (55mm I think) and now I use my 16-35 mm or 24-70 mm lens for landscape shots. So I think I'll have to get one for each of these?

 

[KmH]

Wow, that looks much better - thanks. OK, so the white balance gives more ' colour ' to my clouds?

No. It doesn't give the clouds "more 'colour".
Changing the white balance changes the color.
Plus the white balance of the entire photo can be changed (global edit), or the white balance of the only part of the photo can be changed (local edit) using LRs Adjustment Brush.

Ideally the white balance would have been adjusted in the camera to make all the colors in the scene more accurate, before you tripped the shutter to make the photo.
We have to tell the camera what kind of light is lighting the scene - direct sunlight, cloudy sunlight, shade, tungsten light, fluorescent light, or flash.
Understanding White Balance

Here is what I did using ACR (Adobe Camera Raw/LR Develop module).
Note: Because the photo has a limited 8-bit color depth and is a JPEG file there is some posterization in the sky after the editing. JPEG was not designed to be edited outside the camera.
Image Posterization
Bit Depth
Basic Panel
Temperature: -33
Contrast: +30
The bottom 3 sliders are known as the Presence sliders.
Clarity: +62
Vibrance: +30
Sharpening Panel
Amount: 25
Radius: 1.0
Detail: 25
Masking: 0

 

[Braineack]

What you want to capture in one frame is probably outside the physical Dynamic Range abilities of your image sensor.

This is how GND filters came to be.

 

[in2thewild]

Wow, that looks much better - thanks. OK, so the white balance gives more ' colour ' to my clouds?

No. It doesn't give the clouds "more 'colour".
Changing the white balance changes the color.
Plus the white balance of the entire photo can be changed (global edit), or the white balance of the only part of the photo can be changed (local edit) using LRs Adjustment Brush.

Ideally the white balance would have been adjusted in the camera to make all the colors in the scene more accurate, before you tripped the shutter to make the photo.
We have to tell the camera what kind of light is lighting the scene - direct sunlight, cloudy sunlight, shade, tungsten light, fluorescent light, or flash.
Understanding White Balance

Here is what I did using ACR (Adobe Camera Raw/LR Develop module).
Note: Because the photo has a limited 8-bit color depth and is a JPEG file there is some posterization in the sky after the editing. JPEG was not designed to be edited outside the camera.
Image Posterization
Bit Depth
Basic Panel
Temperature: -33
Contrast: +30
The bottom 3 sliders are known as the Presence sliders.
Clarity: +62
Vibrance: +30
Sharpening Panel
Amount: 25
Radius: 1.0
Detail: 25
Masking: 0

Thanks for explaining all this. I need to go away now and digest it and then try the techniques out this weekend!

 

[in2thewild]

What you want to capture in one frame is probably outside the physical Dynamic Range abilities of your image sensor.

This is how GND filters came to be.

Fair enough. I'll get one... But does it matter which camerai use or any sensor wouldn't be able to cope?

 

[weepete]

It can do. Some sensors are able to capture more dynamic range than others, but there is a limit. At the moment Sony sensors have the edge (they are also in Nikon cameras) being able to capture 14 EVs in one exposure, but our eyes see around 28 EVs.

They way around this is to either use filters to even the exposure on different parts of the image or produce multiple exposures covering the full range of the scene and combine them in post (aka High Dynamic Range or HDR).