Using Luminance to Darken Skies

I was over at Lake Tahoe attending my brother’s soccer tournament this past weekend, and took this photograph from behind the opponent’s goal:

lumi1

I corrected a few things in Adobe Camera RAW, and this is the resulting image (hover over it to compare):

lumi2

The difference isn’t too big. I just corrected a few things, and addressed a tiny bit of clipping in certain areas.

At this point, I wanted the sky to be a little darker and for the clouds to be more dramatic. This is where the luminance tab comes in. All you need to do to instantly make the sky more interesting is drop the slider for aquas and blues. In this case, I decided to drop them both to -50 (I like simple numbers):

lumia

Here is what this simple edit does to the final photograph (hover over it to compare):

lumi3

Pretty neat, huh? Play around with the luminance slider, and you can do pretty interesting things with skies.

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