Project 18: Gradient Filter.

For the next project I'm back to a subject that is far more interesting to me in using Gradient Filters to produce realistic skies. One problem that i do run into now and again while working with landscape photography is how to get the sky to look right when shooting more into the light, what you tend to end up with is a over exposed sky because your camera takes its settings from the foreground not the sky. One way around this is to take two images one exposed for the sky and the other for the landscape and then combine the two in photoshop, this does work well but can sometime be difficult when combining the two layers to make it appear natural. This project takes a similar route but here i learnt to use the Gradient Tool to create a realistic sky. Above is the first image you're given to work on, it has all the problems that I've already spoke about so now I'm going to follow a simple process to produce a new sky for it. First i had to create a new file which is going to make up the new sky, this i made twice as wide and three times as tall because it will make it much easier to position the above photo in later. The new file i then filled with a blue colour using the fill tool and then next selected the Gradient Tool and a slightly lighter blue colour from the colour palette, then with the gradient tool set to radial i dragged out from the centre of the image creating a lighter area in the middle of the image which then gets progressively darker as it moves outwards. The next step is to squash the image using image size to around a third because this gives it a more natural sky appearance and then i moved on to pasting the original image onto my new sky. Using the magic wand tool I'd already selected the buildings so it was just a matter of pasting them onto the new sky and then positioning it where i felt the effect worked best, once this was done and i was happy the final steps were to first use a little Gaussian Blur on the background to make it blend better with the buildings and then flatten the image and crop away the excess background because remember I'd made this much larger then the original image. Below are the results of this work and i have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with how it turned out, i was a little sceptical in the beginning about how natural a false sky would appear but to tell the truth it does stand up to scrutiny really well. The only draw back i can find with it is that it does lack any cloud detail, i know that not all sky have to have clouds in it but i just feel it would look that little bit more realistic with these included (maybe its because of where i live and a blue sky is something of a rarity at the moment.)

As always the final part of the project is to put the method of the project into action in your own work, for this project i chose this very rugged shot that once again has been slightly spoiled by the blown out sky but now this doesn't have to be the end of the world because i have a new way to fix it. Below are the end results and once again I'm really surprised about how well it works maybe i shouldn't be by this point but for some reason i never expect it to work as well as it does. Personally i think it makes a great improvement to the original because of the way the blue contrasts with the green colours in the rocks and mountains.

Although I'm not a big fan of making large changes to my work like this i can now see how using tools like the Gradient Filter can have beneficial effects to my work, don't get me wrong I'm not one of these people who believe that you photos still should appear just as they were taken in the camera in modern digital photography you have to be open to making these kind of alterations if you want your work to standout. I just feel a little uncomfortable doing it sometimes but then that one of the reasons i chose this course in the first place because the more i understand about the uses of photoshop software in photography the happy i am using it.