Bringing Drama into Clouds - How

[TheBigE]

All,

So I have the following two shots - the first one I took on the way to Italy. The Mountain obscured by the clouds and appear I found to be a very nice composition. The size of the houses/church on the hillside really give perspective to the overall magnitude of the image. However, the clouds for me detract - just nothing there....this was a single shot with a bit of crop. How can I improve via PP (if at all) to give the clouds a bit more impact to the image.

I have played around with Lumonsity Masks, Adjustment Brushes, Dodging/Burning...



The second one I took as a 7 shot bracket. I wanted to highlight the clouds and the feeling that they conveyed by being down around the castle. I added the bridge for a bit of foreground object. Not the greatest of composition but still not happy with what I saw and what I processed. This is a single digital blend of two exposures (normal and 2EV). Not the greatest, but as I was working on it I was not feeling it getting any better.



Just wondering if there are some techniques either in Camera or PP to really help build some drama in the sky on days like these...

Thanks
Erik

[ccphoto]

What I see is a lack of mid-tone contrast. Using an expanded mid-tone luminosity mask in combination with a light-lights mask should get you where you want to go. There are several groups with Luminosity programs out on the market but I use Tony Kuyper's actions the most. Inexpensive and easy to use.

[xpatUSA]

I looked at both shots in ImageJ.

In the first shot, the clouds at upper left show a histogram min-to-max of 185 to 253 (grayscale, out of 255). So there appears to be some possibility there for adding contrast. Other areas less so.

The second image would be difficult, I imagine. In a line spanning almost the whole cloud (700px in my download), the variation is only from 215 to 246 and that is smooth and almost linear. Hard to get any contrast at all, I would have thought.

Disclaimer: I do not use layers or masking and I'm just posting the numbers given by ImageJ for what they're worth.

In both cases, if I knew how, I'd darken the clouds and increase the brightness/contrast of the non-clouds, just sayin'. [edit] looks like Mike just agreed partially while I was typing . . [/edit]

[Mike Buckley]

If I understand what you are trying to accomplish, you need to introduce darker tonal values in the clouds. In that sense, I agree with Chris of the need for more mid-tone contrast but I think you also need to increase at least some tones that are darker than the mid tones.

This is the type of situation when I take the attitude of showing those pixels who the boss is, and it ain't them. What do I mean by that? I mean that I take a much more aggressive approach than usual and go so extreme that the results would appear extreme to almost anyone. Then I back off a little and almost always -- voila! -- the look is exactly what I want. But ya gotta show those pixels who the boss is to make all of that happen.

It really doesn't matter what method you use so long as lots of darker tones are introduced that simply aren't there yet. My method would be to select the clouds and then pull the middle of the tone curve very hard toward the bottom right corner of the graph. Depending on how dark I would want the darkest tones in the sky to be, I might even move the curve's black point extremely aggressively. For a before-and-after comparison of two versions of a sky and a screen shot of the extremely aggressive adjustment to the tone curve that changed the sky, see Post #10 of this thread.

By the way, you most definitely discount the quality of the second composition more than I would; I think it's quite nice. Though I really like the backlit quality of the foreground grasses along the bottom of the frame, consider eliminating all of them except the bunch on the left.

[ccphoto]

This is what I did and while it is somewhat different from my first explanation and fairly in line with Mike's suggestions. If you use Photoshop, this will make perfect sense. if not, not sure how to direct you.

[dje]

Hi Erik

I often use a filter called "Detail Extractor" from a Nik plug-in called ColorEfex Pro for this sort of thing. Also some Local Contrast Enhancement can help (Unsharp Mask with large radius and small amount). Here is the effect you get on your images.

Dave

[davidedric]

(I feel a bit diffident, but here we go)

The problem with this kind of sky, I think, is that the light tones are all squashed up together at the right of the histogram.

I mostly use Lightroom. The "Highlights" slider is often thought of as a way of recovering blown highlights, but that's not really what it does. It actually expands the tones in around the top third of the histogram (and of course, loses tine separation in the mid tones -there is no free lunch!).

So what I tend to do to get cloud detail is to use the "whites" slider to make sure I have a good white point, and then use the "highlights" slider to stretch the tones out. In these cases, I've also used the "Dehaze" slider first, and then tried to correct the blue cast it introduces, and adjusted exposure, clarity and contrast.

Thoughts welcome (and TinyPic seems to have worked!)

Dave

[Shadowman]

Nice efforts, I like the second composition.

[TheBigE]

Thanks everyone for the feedback - I worked a bit more on the Mountain image and was able to bring out a bit more of the detail and vision of the clouds that I remember that day.



It was a combination of Lumonsity Masking and Detail Extractor in NIK Collection.

As for the second image - more to follow. Perhaps I should be a bit more clear on the second image and why "I am not happy". Looking back at the image, I see the bridge as the key figure, with the clouds and castle as secondary. My goal was to capture the drama and feeling that the clouds brought to the castle. I do not feel that I captured this image...in short I turned left when I should have gone right and had a better view of the castle and the low hanging clouds.

[Mike Buckley]

Erik,

Your treatment of the revised version of your first photo is exponentially more interesting to my eye than the original.

About your misgivings of the photo of the bridge: If you had displayed the castle rather than the bridge as the primary foreground information, my hunch is that you still would be feeling that the clouds would have played a secondary role rather than a primary role in the image, and I see that as no problem.

[Manfred M]

Erik - unfortunately I am not at home right now and do not have access to my normal "tools".

The classic approach to what you are trying to solve here is to shoot with a 2 or 3 stop neutral density grad filter in order to bring out texture in the clouds. This is usually easy to emulate by adding a gradient and appropriate blending mode in Photoshop. The previously mentioned Nik Collection ColorEfex has this functionality as well and I will combine it with the Pro Contrast filter as well plus a tiny bit of Detail Extractor.