How to Fix the Sky

[chrisburke]

the following image was taken at a golf tournament from Tuesday. I've done some slight color alteration to the ground to make it stick out, but I'm wondering about the sky. The weather was so bad that the sky just looks white, and it blends in with his hat, making it kind of fake looking when you look at its outline around the man putting.

what could i have done/can i do, to give the sky some deffination.

 

[DigitalDiva]

When you made the colour adjustment, what did you do exactly? You could do an average exposure metering between your sky and your subject to get a better exposure of the overall photo. Your sky is completely blown out and without any data there, you can try to adjust it via curves but it's not going to look great.

 

[Meysha]

Basically you've exceeded the lattitude of the film/digital sensor. It can only cope with a certain difference between shadows and highlights. ie: your sky is way too bright compared to the foreground.

To fix it, you could try to do an HDR version of the photo - expose for the sky (underexpose foreground) and then expose for the foreground (over expose sky like above) then you combine the two photos.

Or you could just get the guy to wear a different coloured hat. It doesn't really look unnatural to me in your photo - but his hat does blend which is a shame.

 

[EOS_JD]

With so little detail in the sky it should be pretty easy to add a sky in from another image with a nice blue sky in it. the magic wand should give a nice selection and you can paste in the new sky and mask around the white hat to show your foreground in full against the sky......

 

[skieur]

For speed, I generally use a software graduated blue filter that I use as a plug-in for Photoshop. It is also possible to easily create one in Photoshop and layer it in using the opacity control.

skieur