Project 21: A Stormy Sky.

To begin this section you're given a very straight forward and simple project to complete centered around the idea of begin able to alter the appearance of the weather conditions within a photo.



You're given the above photo to work on (which isn't a bad photo to start with) and told to first using the magic wand or the selection brush select the sky, next i need to remove the colour from this area so using Enhance>Adjust Colour>Remove Colour to do this then Enhance>Adjust Brightness/Contrast>Brightness/Contrast to weaken or darken the sky to the point where i was happy with the appearance. The results that i achieved following this process were no where near as good as I'd expected them to be if I'm honest so reverting back to the original shot i attempted my own approach. What i did differently was with the sky selected i went to the Hue/Saturation controls and removed as much of the colour from the sky as i felt was necessary and then used the Brightness/Contrast to pick out areas to strength that had become a little lost or faded in the process. After i was happy with the results it was then time to move onto the foreground, the reason this needs some attention is that now I've played around with the sky it just doesn't appear realistic anymore, the effect I'm aiming for is a look similar to when you have the sun out reflecting off the dark clouds (which makes these appear darker and more imposing) but also makes all the colours seem much brighter too. To do this i first inversed my selection and then again using the Hue/Saturation tool only slightly increased the saturation because i did want the effect to appear to cartoon like in appearance. One added process i did find i had to add was a warm filter because the foreground appeared to have a very strong blue hue to it making it very cold, so by adding a orange filter i was able to remove this to a point and give it more of a neutral feel. Below you can see the final results.







I found this one of the more enjoyable projects because the focus is more on the area of Photography that most interest me, I'm not saying the others haven't been good its just that these kinds of projects i tend to take much more away from. I'd never overly considered adjusting the weather conditions before in my work but i can see how this can be a useful tool because all photographers know sometimes you can't rely on the weather to produce the conditions you're after so having a back up solution is never a bad thing but i still rather only use this process as that.