Tips and Tricks – Blue Skies

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Morning all! Trish here today to bring you my trick to keeping those blue skies blue in your photos after editing.

Now, I do a lot of editing to my photos… I do mean a lot. lol I like my photos to match what I want to work with (as demonstrated here). But even when I’m not playing with the colors of my photos or doing something drastic to them sometimes after doing basic editing my skies are no longer blue. This happens a lot to my summer outdoor pictures, because I don’t know about where you live, but here in the southern United States our clear summer skies are generally a more washed out super-pale blue to begin with.

Here’s an example from yesterday (no it’s not summer anymore, but again southern US – it’s just now thinking of becoming fall lol). This is the original SOOC (straight out of camera) picture: 

 And here it is after just some of the most basic editing I do (which I don’t plan to leave it at for my page anyway).  Already I’m starting to lose my blue skies.

 After my next set of edits (which I did with actions by the talented Sarah Cornish of My Four Hens) my sky is even less blue. For the most part this is the effect I want the picture to have for my layout, but while I like the vintage look I’d prefer my sky to be more bluish than it currently is. 

 So, I’ve seen lots of tutorials on fixing skies in photos, but truthfully, they either confuse me or as soon as I learn them I forget how on earth I did all the steps, or how to do the steps. Even going back and re-reading them I’d get confused, so I figured out an easier way to do it. Here’s what we’ll do:

Open both your edit and your original photo in one work area. Duplicate the edit and order your layers like this Edit>Original>Edit like so:

 Now take a soft eraser brush and go over the sky in the top Edit layer being careful to only get the sky.

 Now that is much too blue for the rest of the picture. It might seem quicker to adjust the opacity of the eraser instead of going through these next steps, but by just using the eraser at the opacity of 100%, it gives you more room to adjust and play with the blue level without having to keep repeatedly erasing the sky.

What you will do is select the Original layer and you can lower the opacity on that to however much you want to get that shade of blue that you really want. I lowered mine to 25% so that it’s blue, but not too blue.

Now to finish it all I’ll scrap my page! I used primarily French Countryside though there are touches of a few other kits.

Well, I hope y’all enjoyed that and find the post helpful! Don’t miss tomorrow’s post with a little romantic inspiration!

TrishTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 4 Comments