Luminance for depth to skies

More photos yet again taken at the beach. It is summer here and the light is strong with well defined and strong shadows. I usually get an exposure setting, for my photos, on the object I am wanting to photograph, which results in correct exposure for the object I have in focus but unfortunately there is often a washed out sky. Skies have been beautiful over the last couple of weeks here as there is rain around and although sunsets have been without colour, they are truly stunning in monochrome. It is disappointing then to download photos to lightroom and find the less than impressive skies.

A trick that I use often to give depth to skies is to decrease luminance of blue and aqua in Lightroom. Sometimes I will also bump up saturation but only if required. This is what I have done in the following photos taken late Saturday afternoon.

In all cases luminance of both colours has been decreased by up to 50. (Lightroom 4 Beta version)

Have a great week everyone.

Watercolour Painting with Paintshop Pro

For those who commented on my "painting" in the forum earlier this week, I have put together the steps I took to achieve the effect. It uses a combination of techniques from Photoshop tutorials adapted for PSP.

 Here is the original image that I was working from. I took this photo in Rajasthan, India in 2006.

Method

1. 1.       Duplicate your image and blur. (Adjust/Blur/Gaussian Blur of radius 3)
   2.       Duplicate this layer and apply Artistic Effect/ Glowing Edges. (I used default 3.20)
   3.       Invert this layer. (Image/Negative Image)
   4.       Convert glowing lines to greyscale and desaturate to approximately 40%.
   5.       Duplicate the layer from step 1 and drag this layer to the top. Invert this layer (as in 3) and set the blending mode to Dodge. The image will be mostly white and this will be the base to paint (i.e. reveal the image with colour below).
   6.       Now comes the fun part. Using a variety of brushes with colour set to black and opacity at no more than 40% you start painting the brush strokes. As you are working on a dodge layer, the effect of this will be to reveal the underlying colours of the photo. Use a variety of brushes (I used dry brush and van gogh). You can build up colour by going over areas more than once. It is better to work with larger brush strokes and move down to smaller to fill in detail.
   7.       Lastly you can merge the layers and add a subtle texture effect eg. Canvas fine.
   
   
   Vary the parameters to achieve different effects. 
   Here is another one that took just 5 minutes. Al Hajjar in Yemen.