Drama in the Heavens

… except it isn’t entirely.

 

This was taken from the North Devon coast last November. I processed it weeks ago but I have never published it because I was never quite comfortable with sharing the result. You see, it’s more created than captured. The drama comes mainly from the processing and doesn’t reflect the original or even the way I remembered it. As the result is fairly realistic, though false, I wanted to avoid misleading folk.

 

But for Smile on Saturday today we have a super theme Over-processed Skies. An opportunity not to be missed, and I don’t need to care too much about the level of duplicity involved. I’ve checked some of the example gallery for the theme, and there seem to be realistic over-processed images as well as false colour ones there so I hope this will be OK. I’ll post a link to the in-camera image so you can see where we started.

 

Processing skies is great fun. All you need is a few tall piles of fluffy white cumulus and you are away. Polarising filters are meant to help (darkening the skies) but their effects are very direction-specific (the skies are most polarised at 90 degrees from the sun and not at all directly away from it) and they create problems with wide angles as a result.

 

The main object is to enhance colour and contrast. Unless the sun is low in the sky both will be low. These days raw converters offer lots of tools to help like Clarity, DeHaze (or Haze) and the usual contrast sliders.

 

I remember reading in a book ages ago about how to enhance skies. Just duplicate the image layer in Photoshop (or another layer-based editor such as the free online Pixlr), and then set the blend mode of the top copy to Overlay. Easy then. So having zapped the raw into a contrasty saturated .tif file using a raw converter (I actually used Darktable for that as another experiment) I did something similar with duplicated layers, using Multiply as the blend mode which produces a darker result than Overlay. I sharpened it using High Pass and Linear Light blend at a high setting which improves local contrast. I managed to get a reasonable square crop out of it to emphasise the height of the sky. Finally, I did just a little tweaking and vignetting in Nik Color Efex.

 

So there we are. The result reminds me of the skies of many paintings I see hanging in stately homes - Constables or Turners perhaps, or dramatic naval battles. All a bit colourful and full of over-cooked drama. Just right for amusing oneself (and others hopefully!) on a Saturday :)

 

Thanks for looking. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Smile on Saturday :)

Done