Hey guys, Ryan here at Signature Edits, and today I'm going to show you how to
fix a blown out sky and add sky effects inside of Lightroom.
Alright so sky editing can be one of the trickiest parts of editing a photo.
There's so many options how you can fix a blown out sky in Lightroom. Sky
replacement is something a lot of photographers do when there's just no
detail left in the photo, but as of yet you can't actually replace the sky in
Lightroom without taking your image over to Photoshop. So how do you fix a bright
sky or fix and edit the skyline to enhance the colors quickly and easily?
That's a question that we're gonna look at today. Using the auto mask feature we
can easily recover highlights and do all sorts of sky effects to enhance our
photos. Here's how you do it. First things first we're going to make a new
adjustment brush we're going to set the size all the way to max our feather down
minimally and our flow to 100 and then we're going to check this little Auto
mask box what that's going to do is allow Lightroom to automatically create
your masks for you and save a ton of time especially if you've got some
complicated textures and details that you need to mask out like these trees
here for instance then we're going to zoom out in our photos so that our mask
brush adjustment brush can cover the entire photo the reason for this is
we're now going to make a sample of a particular part of the sky and Lightroom
using that one sample we'll click it once on the photo is going to
automatically grab all of the color information and brightness information
that looks like it's related to that one little sample now I can actually grab
this and move it around to different parts of the image and Lightroom will
again automatically find the different areas of the image that again match up
with this point so if I click again in a different area now it's going to sample
from both the colors like this and the colors down in here so I'm just going to
do that a couple of times and click on my sky here like that and as you can see
it's automatically filling in and selecting the areas that I'm clicking
now I click too far and it accidentally masked further than I needed it to so
I'm just going to hit command set a couple of times to undo that
and then the last thing I'm going to do is go to my secondary brush I'm going to
set the flow up to 100 and this is a smaller brush I'm going to then take it
and just go over the parts of this guy that are easy for me to paint on quickly
so basically what you're doing is you're using Lightroom's Auto mask feature to
get these fine details here so that you don't have to do it personally and then
afterwards go over and just make sure that it hasn't missed any tiny little
spots perfect so now that I've done that I'm going to hold alt and erase and
really quickly just erase down in here because it looks like lightroom has
automatically selected some of this road that doesn't need to be selected I'm
going to press o and that's going to get rid of this red overlay okay now what I
can do is just lower my exposure here and we'll darken this guy just like that
now if you want to add a little bit more blue to this guy all you have to do is
take your temperature control and just shift it towards blue and that's a
little far we're going to leave it somewhere around here and now I'm going
to brighten the whole image up make this maybe even a little bit darker up my
clarity I don't need to have any sharpness on there a little bit of D
haze perhaps and get rid of the saturation and just like that I have
gone from here to here all right let's keep going this photo here I love the
vibes but it's a little washed out looking for me so I'm going to do the
same thing again grabbing my adjustment brush I'm going to switch to adjustment
brush a make sure that my flow is at a hundred sizes is one hundred in my auto
mask is on then I'm going to sample a portion of the image here by clicking in
press o to see where Lightroom is masking and sure enough in one click it
is pretty much covered everything I'm just going to hit this little bit of sky
and it looks like Lightroom's not loving me for that so we're going to just stick
there press o again and same trick I can you know let's just reset all these
settings I can add a little bit of blue by just taking the color balance down
this way maybe upping my saturation taking down
my exposure a little bit and just like that I've gone fire to
here okay let's keep going so another area of sky replacement that can be
tricky is getting details back in clouds so before you actually do this
adjustment brush technique the first thing you need to check is whether or
not your image has any detail left anyways because if this in camera if
this photo had actually blown out these whites and the clouds there would be no
detail left to rescue in the first place so an easy trick is you just take your
exposure down and see if you were just exposing for the clouds oK we've got a
little bit of texture in there but not a ton so obviously I'm not worrying about
how the rest of the image looks right now just the clouds so I could
definitely bring some out but we're gonna be watching there's definitely
some purple and some weird noise coming up in here so we're going to do this now
I'm going to reset and undo those changes and I'm going to do the same
thing as our last couple of images go to adjustment brush a and just click that
sky press o to see my mask and that's looking pretty good and then hold alt
I'm going to erase off of the hill here
great press o again and then I can just lower my exposure like that maybe add
some contrast take the blacks down and one thing you can do if you're having
issues with pulling the sky back too much and it's making those weird
splotchy purpley colors all you have to do is just take your noise and turn that
up and my clarity I can turn that down because there's really not a whole lot
going on in here I can take my sharpness down the two and
that'll help blend things together and you can see that in this image there's
still some weird kind of speckles going on here so I can actually just make that
a little bit less of a drastic change zoom back out here's before and here's
after so I hope you can see how easy and fast this is it lets you grep so I hope
you can see how easy and fast it is to replace the details in the sky by
pulling the exposure back down just making yourself a nice auto
so I hope you so obviously this is a super easy quick way to mask out your
sky and get your details back without moving into Photoshop and just
recovering the highlights from our sky ever so easily and fast again if you're
having issues with weird splotches going on you can just lower your sharpness
turn your denoising on a little bit ditch the saturation or just take your
effect back so it's a little more subtle
there's going to be a limit to how much detail you can actually rescue in your
image it all depends on the raw file so before you try and push things too far
you can always check and just say okay if I take this down is there still color
in the clouds yes there is okay I'm gonna go ahead and edit this as I would
and if not then you're going to have to look at a technique like replacing this
guy inside of Photoshop so we'll just do a couple more here now in this case this
image isn't working very well and why is that
well it's because if we actually take a look at our image our colors are not
super distinct yes this guy is much brighter than the rest of the image
however it's not a whole lot different in color and exposure on some of these
reflections on the buildings etc so one thing that we can try is turning our
range mask on so I'm going to click in here as I was before
just on the different areas of this sunset and once I've done that I'm going
to take my range mask turn it on to luminance so what that's going to do is
it's going to filter out any darker areas based on the setting that I give
it so I'm going to slide my shadows up
and you can see that slowly but surely Lightroom is omitting the darker areas
of the image from this mask just like that so this is without the range mask
and this is with it on so then I can proceed as normal press o again to see
what I'm doing take my exposure down a little bit and
we'll just be darkening the road here this sunset now if you want to get some
really great popping colors take your clarity up your contrast up a little bit
just exaggerate the highlights and shadows ever so slightly a little bit of
saturation a little bit of sharpness and a little bit of noise is going to help
as you're pulling the details back great let's keep going so this next image is a
fantastic example of where this technique can save you a ton of time
we've got a very complicated mountain right here which would be so hard for me
to manually go in there and draw my mask in by myself however if i zoom back out
using our technique take this adjustment brush size one hundred feather all the
way down flow all the way up Auto mask and then I click here in the sky
BAM one click two clicks three clicks you can kind of paint on there and
eventually Lightroom will clue in now that is the only part about using an
auto mask function sometimes it's not going to do exactly what you want it to
do but that's fine we can always try our range mask trick again take our
luminance slider slide that up and you can see how now it's only affecting the
very white portions of the image the parts that are very bright indeed great
so now I'm going to pull that back
and just like that we've got a whole lot of detail in the sky that otherwise
would have been lost I can make this guy more blue by lowering that white balance
a little bit turn my saturation up and even a little bit of D haze maybe
perfect before and here's after a big difference a same thing goes for this
image obviously our foreground here is super super dark because whoever took
this photo was exposing for the sky generally that's the best possible rule
because you do not want to lose the highlights in the sky if that word gone
when I pulled it down if it just stayed white there's nothing I can do but
because I can see that all of the sky detail is still there it's okay all I
have to do is it grab my little brush press o here click click click and now
I'm going to switch to my second brush just to go over these areas once more
press o again pull my exposure back and just like that we have our beautiful sky
once more I'm not incredible now obviously you're going to want to edit
the rest of the image too so that things don't look quite so weird and unnatural
but in about 30 seconds I was able to do something that manually would have been
next to impossible or taking me a long time here is before and here is after
alright two more and we're done this photo was taken at Zion National Park
we're just going to delete everything here all we have to do to get this guy
back is first we're going to check if there is detail yes and no this is a
good example of what happens when you over expose your photo and there's just
nothing you can do because down here where the Sun is setting you can clearly
see there's some white areas that no matter how far down I take my slider
they're going to stay white that's because they were blown out in the
actual camera there's nothing we can do to get them back but the rest of this
image we still have a shot at getting some detail back so what I'm going to do
is the same as the other images zoom out got my large brush press o to see what
it's doing
perfect and you can see there's a lot of detail around this tree that otherwise
if I were trying to paint this manually it would be a hopeless process but
because we're using the auto brush in Lightroom we're getting pretty good
results very very fast so now go to my secondary brush and I'm very lightly
just going to brush on top of these trees throw my flow down and that's
going to minimize the effects of those weird kind of white splotches and that
can be a good technique to see here on the mountain where we've got this kind
of weird line going on by painting on top of it just very lightly we can make
it a little bit less extreme
okay so let's zoom out press o again take our exposure down not that far
Lightroom is not playing very nice with me right now it's kind of stalling so
it's hard for me to tell what it actually looks like great so again
here's before completely white and after in this case we're not going to get as
much detail back simply because it was gone
we never captured it in camera so it's too late now obviously the work that I
did to make this little transition a little more subtle actually wound up
making everything look weird so I have to go through and probably redo that
again the easiest way to do that is with our auto brush just click on that area
perfect okay one more and we're done this is an example again of just
maximizing dynamic range without making it look weird this portion of the ferry
is clearly a lot darker than the sky and that's fine but if I want to brighten it
up and get more detail out of the sky all I have to do zoom out click on that
sky
and you can see that it's not working exceptionally well in this particular
image why is that well sometimes the colors are just too close together we've
got blue sky blue water and all of that is reflecting blue light onto this now
blue building and so to do this we're going to have to be a little bit more
manual a little bit less automatic we're going to select all the water in the sky
here then after that we're going to go over onto our erase or actually will go
down to our range mask use that take our range all the way up and now we've just
selected this guy awesome so we'll take that exposure down contrast way up add
some blue get that really blue sky in the Blue Mountains in the back and take
our blocks down perfect so we've gone from here to here now we can take the
rest of the image a little bit more bright without losing any of the detail
in this guy so that is how you edit the sky in lightroom getting your details
back without having to replace this guy in Photoshop I hope this was helpful for
you if it was please leave me a comment let me know I want to hear it
make sure to hit that like button and subscribe for more great content I will
see you in the next one
you