Recovering the Clouds in Lightroom

I rarely think. To those that know me, thats no shocker, but when I am in a new location trying to think of the best place to shoot at the right angle, I tend to forget details. The summer time in Colorado has some amazing skies in the afternoon and I love to take advantage of it. Problem is, I don't always put on the proper tools to get those skies at their best. For those moments, I present a quick and fast way to recover those great skies in case you forget the invaluable filters ( polorizer ).

Notice how this shot looks as if there is no background detail at all. If you shoot raw, you get a ton of information in a frame that you can take advantage of with some simple steps that takes less than 10 minutes depending on how complicated the shot is.

The first step is to recover the cloud detail by using an adjustment brush to drop the exposure of the area in question. By applying the adjustment brush ( pressing 'k' ) and painting the sky with a negative exposure ( I happened to use an exposure setting of -2.30 ) you get to see the clouds come back. Of course if the detail is just gone, meaning that its blown out, then no amount of happy Bob Ross painting will get you your happy little clouds and you have to go on to plan b. What is plan b? Im not sure yet, but when I figure that out, I'll make sure to blog about it. One of my pet peeves is having an obvious outline around the area that is being worked on. This is your work. Take the time to do it right. I know you want to post it to every photo site you can so that the whole world can see it, but geez learn to stay in the lines. One thing to help out with that is to make sure the feather size is pretty high so that if you were a bad crayoner (yeah I made that word up ) the result is not too obvious. A tablet really comes in handy by the way. Just saying. Ok, when you are done, you should get something that looks like the image below....except replace my image with yours because that would just be creepy if you had my raw files.

Now that you got sky detail back, the next step is to get some good dramatic colors. The trick here is in HSL/Color adjustments. I chose the Color panel. I clicked on the color that I wanted to adjust ( in this case blue..if you are not sure what blue is, please seek immediate help or hover your mouse over the different color boxes until a nice pretty label pops up saying....you guessed it, blue ). Play around with the saturation and luminance values until you get the nice dramatic sky that you would normally get by using a polorizer or some other filter on the lens.

Below is the Color adjustment section in the Develop module of lightroom. The image shows the values I used to get the final image that I was going for.

This last portion of the technique works well in changing colors of different things as well, but I am just limiting this tutorial to clouds. If you wanted to change the color of the sky, you could always adjust the hue and get some crazy effects. This adjustment basically takes the color that you selected and applies the adjustment to anything in the photo that matches that color. Want to make a blonde a redhead? Click yellow and move the hue around to make her/him spicy. The great thing about Lightroom is that you can make any change you want and its not going to actually touch the raw file so you can make as many happy little mistakes as you want and not worry about starting all over. Remember your good little friend Command-Z ( CTRL-Z for you freak PC users ) if you make a mistake or just press the reset button ( not on your computer, that would just be overkill ).

When all is said and done, the final image gives shows that the raw file format contains a lot of information that is just waiting to be extracted. You don't need that fancy HDR effect that requires way more steps and Photoshop to boot.

Voila

Thanks for reading. Leave some comments if you want to know more or feel I left something out.