Changing the weather in Photoshop

“shadows from overcast skies are soft, revealing detail throughout...The problem though with overcast skies is that the sky itself often renders plain boring white.”

his image comes from our second trip to Yosemite. We were there in the autumn to capture the fall colors.

The weather and the light were challenging, as the skies were predominately overcast.

Overcast skies and their resulting soft light have some advantages over clear skies and direct light. The shadows resulting from direct sunlight typically render black with no recoverable detail. Conversely shadows from overcast skies are soft, revealing detail throughout. The problem though with overcast skies is that the sky itself often renders plain boring white. This image is such an example. Our resulting image actually has a sky borrowed from another image. To help the scene match the borrowed sky the nik Multimedia Sunshine filter was used to make it look like the sun was actually shining that day. But first the background on how the photo was taken.

I chose a 24mm lens because its angle of view was appropriate for the scene. My initial position for the camera was about 4 feet from the mound of green grass. At this close distance the wide-angle lens rendered the grassy mound disportionally too large for the picture. I picked up the camera, still secured to the tripod and moved backwards checking the viewfinder every foot. By moving the camera back, the size of the grassy mound became smaller relative to the size of the background. At a distance of about ten feet the grass in the foreground balanced well against El Caption in the background. The camera height was about six feet, pointed slightly down. This maximized the distance in the picture between the grass and the background.

The camera a Nikon N90s was set to aperture priority and f:11. The lens was focused using the hyper focal settings to include a depth of focus from approximately eight feet to infinity. I had to decide between using a Tiffen 812 filter to warm up the foliage, or a polarizing filter to try to add drama to the sky. I couldn’t use both at the same time because the two filters combined would vignette on my wide angle lens. I choose the polarizer knowing that it would also increase the saturation of the foliage. Three exposures of normal, 2/3 over, and 2/3 under were taken. Velvia slide film was chosen because of its higher contrast, a good choice for an overcast day. As always an electronic cable release was used to minimize camera movement during the exposure.

Original image

After nik Sunshine filter

After Hue/Saturation

The 2/3 over slide was used for the scan. The normal exposure was too dark due to the white sky, white mountain, and white reflection off the water. Situations like this are why we always bracket our exposures when shooting slide film. The first correction was a minor Levels adjustment to bring the image back to the way the slide looks. Next a major transformation to the image was made, the nik Color Efex Sunshine filter was used to convert the scene from a dull overcast day to a bright sunny one. I liked the look but never being satisfied, thought the grassy mound in the foreground needed more emphasis. A Hue/Saturation adjustment was made to increase the saturation in the greens popping the colors in my grassy mound.

At this point the image is looking good except for the flat white sky. I decide to put a different sky into the image. I used the Corel Knockout plug-in to mask out the sky. I then loaded my new sky into the selection. Then a second Hue/Saturation adjustment was made to increase saturation in the blues to add a deeper blue color to the water.

Note; Corel Knockout is the best masking solution we have found. We own both it and Extensis Mask Pro. Knockout has more finesse with the fine details such as tree branches. Before you rush out and buy it however know that it took over an hour to mask the sky out of this image using Knockout. Without Knockout this image would have been next to impossible. Masking is always a tedious time consuming task.

To finalize the image I applied the plug-in Grain Surgery to reduce the film grain and noise in the image. The image was then saved with the adjustment layers open and without being sharpened. I only sharpen when actually outputting images. The images for this article were sharpened using nik Sharpener Pro.

Enjoy,

Mike and Tammy Rice