Come the day of the shoot, his excitement turned to devastation as the weather had taken a horrible turn. A cold front had moved in . . . the sky was dark and overcast; it was cold, windy and about to snow. The groundskeeper’s proud day had turned to mush.

No matter how you feel about the ethics of reworking images with digital tools, sometimes you just have to! If it’s not a photojournalistic image, and it’s not an evidentiary or forensic image, it’s fair enough to dress it up a bit before you send it out into the world. If ever there was a time for digital enhancements, this was it.

We shot several angles, some from the ground, some from a bucket truck, even a few series of overlapping verticals so I could stitch together a partial panorama. The images were predictably dull and flat with no life to them. Yet my final delivered images were bright and colorful and looked like a beautiful fall day, just right for football!

Here’s the process I used to brighten such a dreary day photo:

We’ll work with an unretouched image from that day’s shoot, rendered from a
Camera RAW file from a Kodak Professional digital camera.

I’ll start by creating the best mask I can for the sky. I choose to do this in two steps.

First, I use the lasso tool to crudely outline the area of the shot I’m working with, giving myself a “working selection”, if you will

You can see that my selection goes well below the bottom of the sky. I then use the Color Range tool to define the bottom of the selection. There’s a slider that let’s you “season to taste” and an eyedropper that enables you to add to or take away from the selection as you define it. If you haven’t used the Color Range tool before, it’s pretty intuitive.

Take the time to examine your selection closely making sure it’s tight enough to the horizon line without including anything that isn’t “sky”. When you’re happy with your selection, save it.

I’m going to take you through two ways of enhancing the sky. The first way is faster and requires no preparation. It yields a very nice generic blue sky. The second way requires that you have a stock shot of a sky to paste in.

In the first method I use the Gradient Tool to add a uniformly blended gradient to represent the sky. I start by assigning values to the foreground and background colors that will become the brighter portion and darker portion of my sky. I’ve done this part by eye when in a pinch; however, I now keep a file handy that I call, “BlueSky”. Anytime I want to generate a generic blue sky, I call up this image and set the foreground and background colors using the eyedropper to sample appropriate sections of this photo of a real sky.

Now go back to the shot you’re working on and load the selection you just created for the sky. At this point I feather the selection by only a few pixels . . . the amount of feathering is based on personal preference, and you’ll find the tolerance that suits you best through quick experimentation. However, rarely do I feather it more than two pixels. This softens the mask a touch and helps the artificial sky blend naturally with the horizon line . . . it won’t have a “cut-in” look if you’ve done it right.

After loading and feathering the selection, use the gradient tool to paint in your new sky.

Chances are the new sky needs some tweaking in either color, exposure, contrast or saturation. Use your favorite tools to adjust the sky to look natural.

NOTE . . . the temptation is to put in a really, really nice sky . . . very blue and
saturated. I’ve learned to back off from that, to desaturate it a bit and maybe take out some of the blue . . . not as flashy, but it’s much more representative of a normal sky. This is a case where less is more.

Invert your selection and make appropriate adjustments for the rest of the image.

For the football field shot I’m working with, I basically increased contrast and warmed up the image by removing some blue (which effectively adds yellow).

At this point, you’re finished with the 1st technique, and you can see quite a difference between your starting image and your finished image.

To use the second method, you’ll need at least one existing shot with the kind of sky that you’d like to “borrow”. Many photographers actively collect stock photos of skies . . . with and without clouds . . . at sunrise and sunset, etc, so they’ll have just the right sky when needed.

(TRIVIA . . . before you scream “foul” about pasting skies into your photos, did you know that in “the old days”, many pro photographers used to pre-expose rolls of 35mm film with night shots of the moon at a known good exposure. They would expose the moon in different parts of the “sky” and in different magnifications. At some future date when the appropriate scene came along, they would load up one of these pre-exposed rolls and shoot dusk shots or evening shots or night shots, and they could trust that each one would have a perfectly exposed moon in the sky. Manipulation has always been around; it just used to be much harder than it is today).

Select the stock sky shot you’d like to work with and copy it . . . either the whole image or just the section of it that seems to match up with the space you need to fill.

Load the selection you created earlier for the sky . . . feather that selection as you did before, then paste in the new sky using the Paste Into command under Edit. This command pastes the sky into a layer mask . . . this allows you to “scroll” it around if there’s extra room in your sky image and position it ideally.

Adjust the sky so color, contrast, saturation, etc all have a normal look.

Invert the selection and/or switch to the base layer in your PhotoShop document and adjust the main image if you haven’t already done so.

Once again, you can see that the end result presents a much cheerier image than we started with.

And having shot panoramics for the last 15 years, I can’t help myself . . . here is an image that hangs in the school district administration building.

A final comment on the ethics of image manipulation. It used to be the photographer’s job to faithfully reproduce reality . . . now, in my opinion, it is the photographer’s job to create the reality that’s in the client’s mind’s eye! Think about the football field . . . that final panoramic image with the enhancements in place fits the expectation of the groundskeeper and the athletic director . . . I matched their view of that scene and did it photographically. IF you can do this with one click of the shutter, that’s ideal . . . but if not . . . get creative!
I for one revel in the creativity we can bring to our images now!

About the author:
Pat St. Clair has a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Miami University (O), 1971, and a bachelor’s degree in professional photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology, 1979; he has been photographing commercially since 1978. St. Clair serves a corporate clientele that includes agencies of all sizes as well as direct corporate clients such as Eastman Kodak Company, Palm, Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, 3Com, DaimlerChrysler, ExxonMobil, Microwave Data Systems and more. He was an early adopter of digital technology and has worked with Eastman Kodak Company on digital capture projects and digital image quality issues for the last eleven years. He has worked with QuickTime VR since 1994, is a charter member of the IQTVRA (now the IVRPA), and was a speaker at the first four VR Summits in Boulder, CO, Washington, DC, Sedona, AZ and Savannah, GA. He is onboard to speak again at the 2006 VR Summit.

He owns and operates St. Clair Photo-Imaging in Rochester, NY. More about Pat St. Clair and his work can be found at St. Clair Photoimaging
Comments? Email Pat St. Clair: pat[at]stclairphoto-imaging[dot]com