Creating Better Skies

Because I already touched on sky processing in the previous chapter, I thought I’d kick off this chapter with some additional tricks to really make the skies in your photos pop.

The problem with skies is that they are usually much brighter than the rest of the subjects in the scene. Even though it may not look like it to your naked eye while shooting the photo, brighter skies will usually appear in your photos.

Dropping the Highlights

The first step to improving the sky in an image is to process your image as you normally would. This means making everything else in the image look good by adjusting Exposure, White Balance, Clarity, and so on. Once that is done, view the histogram and determine whether clipping is occurring in the sky, especially if there are clouds. One of the best ways to improve your image is to start moving the Highlights slider to the left. If you are using an older version of Lightroom, you would use the Recovery slider. Press the J key to turn on your clipping warning, and then start dragging the slider until you bring back details in the clouds and remove all clipping. If you really want a lot of detail in the clouds, move the Highlights slider to....Figure 5.1