When you take photos, your sky may not as blue as you like. This problem can be solving by processing your photos in Photoshop. This post will demonstrate you how to get better blue sky (more dark blue tone) by applying gradient and blending layer property. Anyway, please take a look at before/after shot as listed below.
1. Open a photo.
2. Select gradient tool from tool pallet and assign foreground as black and background as white.
3. Select gradient from layer pallet.
4. Adjust gradient fill properties. For this case, I use following parameters: Style: liner, Angle – 90 and scale = 150.
5. You will see gradient effect as show in the photo below.
6. Go to layer pallet and change layer property to Overlay. Reduce opacity from 100% to 60%. The parameters can be adjusted according to each photo.
7. That is. You will see that after applying this technique, your sky will be bluer.
Have a nice and lovely day.
There is an easier way to this result…
Set your foreground colour to black
Click on layer – New fill layer – Gradient fill (alternative to step 2 and 3)
Change the type to ‘overlay’ and check the ‘reverse’ box (alternative to step 4 and 6)
The gradient will be foreground to transpatent
The scale depends on the picture
Also to further the effect, if you want to keep the balloon’s colour, follow these steps:
On the layer window, duplicate the base image and give it a name which you can remember.
in that same window, highlight the base layer and do the same technique as above (while the duplicated layer is invisible (click on the eye to the left of the layer you want to make invisible)
Once you are happy with the sky, make the hidden layer visible and highlight it.
Use the magic eraser tool to remove the unwanted bits of the sky, being careful to set the similarity and other settings to get rid of only the bits you want to remove.
Neil,
Thanks for sharing your tip as well.