We’ve all been there: you take a perfectly exposed photo in the field, only to find that the sky looks boring and washed out when you get home. You might try reducing the highlights or adding some clarity, but nothing seems to work. Luckily, there’s a new option in Lightroom called Select Sky that can help you recover detail you didn’t even know was there.
First, use the Select Sky tool to create a selection of the sky in your image. Next, head down to the Dehaze tool and increase it to almost 100%. This will make the sky look grainy and oversaturated, but it’s just a starting point. Bring down the texture to -100, add some noise reduction, and desaturate to around -75. Now, the sky should look a lot better.
The next step is to match the color of the sky to the rest of the image. Click on the Color section and then the Xbox to bring up the color table. Click and drag the eyedropper around until you find a color that matches the rest of the image. Fine-tune the whites to around +10 and add a hint of clarity, and voila! You have a dramatic sky that you didn’t even know was possible.
Remember, even a nearly white sky holds pixel information that can be restored with the right manipulation. So the next time you take a photo with a boring sky, don’t despair. With a little bit of editing, you can create some really moody scenes that will take your photography to the next level.
That’s it for this two-minute tutorial. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your images and cameras.