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DPChallenge Forums >> Individual Photograph Discussion >> Major Sky Reconstruction
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Showing posts 1 - 13 of 13, (reverse)
AuthorThread
 01/07/2005 02:55:24 PM · #1
This image always had potential, I thought, but the sky upper right was totally blown. I finally decided to try to fix it. Did I done good?

Original:

'Shopped image:

There was a lot of work done all over, but the sky's the main thing...

Robt.
 01/07/2005 02:58:33 PM · #2
Looks good to me at 640 resolution. The real test would be to see what the print looks like.
 01/07/2005 03:02:07 PM · #3
Print's fine at 11x14 on my Epson 2000P...

Robt.

01/07/2005 03:11:01 PM · #4
Looks good. What did you do to fix it? Digital blending, or...?

01/07/2005 03:12:17 PM · #5
Beautifully done in my opinion. Looks very natural, not overly processed.
 01/07/2005 03:35:03 PM · #6
Made avery careful selection of everything above the treeline, used the clone tool to reconstruct sky in blownout areas, applied a little gaussion blur and faded it in on the luminance setting.

Note lower left, piece of bridge cloned out. Lots of curve adjustments, hue/saturation adjustments, throughout image, but relatively minor except in sky, where there is a significant desaturation of blue and cyan to mellow the tonalities.

Robt.

01/07/2005 03:38:41 PM · #7
Very well done!
 01/07/2005 03:48:28 PM · #8
Looks beautiful to me. I love the colors in the fixed image. They look warmer.
There is just a little thing though.
Maybe I wouldn't even notice it, if I didn't know it was fixed, but now that I do know...
I think you should add some reflection of the "new clouds" to the water. because now there's only a cloud reflection where the original cloud was, and none where the "new clouds" are.
Other then that, I think you did a fantastic work!
 01/07/2005 04:05:48 PM · #9
Jin,

In the original view there were clouds everywhere "low", much as I have cloned them in, and none in the high sky over my head. You'll notice that in the original shot, the water's not blown out anywhere and there are no clouds in that reflected area. The angle of reflection from the camera down to the water and back up again is actually of an unclouded portion of sky that is not visible in the frame of the picture.

I did try bringing some clouds down there, but I couldn't make them look natural and gave it up, at least for now. Astute observation, nevertheless.

Thanks all for the kind comments; I guess this worked...

Robt.

01/08/2005 11:08:40 AM · #10
You've done well on a very difficult task -- making the horizon look natural is a problem. Here are two that I produced for billboards many years ago (I did it on a UMAX Macintosh Clone, if that tells you anything!):

//levelfive.com/HTML/PORTFOLIO/oceanfront.html
//levelfive.com/HTML/PORTFOLIO/ocean_harbor.html

On the second one, you can see on the tree to the right how I had a hard time getting the tree to look natural.

I have since figured out a technique that would have solved that problem: put the new sky on the bottom layer but leave the sky under the trees, trim the solid areas of the trees (in other words, delete the old sky) and put them on the top layer, and here's the trick: on the fuzzy blown-out part of the trees, put that on a separate layer -- you'll wind up with lots of thin lines -- and set the layer to multiply. This will incorporate the sky color into the blown-out areas of the tree.

DISCLAIMER -- I didn't take the photos, just P'shopped them. I think the golf course picture is really awful.
 01/08/2005 11:40:51 AM · #11
For horizons, something else that works, although I didn't need it here, is the following:

1. select out sky roughly, then magnify significantly and cruise the horizon modifying the selction as needed. Save selection as "sky."

2. Do your thing on the sky, using a duplicate layer from background.

3. Duplicate this layer when you are finished, leaving it on top of previous layer. Load sky selection and delete sky.

4. Invert selection, then modify selection using "border". Specify border wight as 2 pixels. Magnify to a relatively small area of the sky/foreground interface. Apply gaussian blur, around a value of 10-15, to the border selction.

5. Now go to "edit/fade gaussian blur" and adjust fade to whatever point looks most natural.

This will eliminate the cookie-cutter look of too sharp a delineation between sky and horizon line.

Robt.

Message edited by author 2005-01-08 11:41:44.
 01/08/2005 12:16:53 PM · #12
The golden quality of light is just excellent, and your reworked sky is consistent with that light. Since you told us the sky was photoshopped, I noticed the cloned billows and the 'wavyness' (like in the sky directly above the boat, there's a darker section between two brighter ones), but I doubt I'd have noticed it otherwise.
 01/08/2005 12:26:27 PM · #13
That shows why it's so important not to completely blow something out. It's so easy to bring out the detail even when there's just a little bit to work with. It looks good.
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