A desperate attempt

[clutchkiller]

If anyone wants to know how to go from an image like this with PS...

Before

To an image like this...

After

I can try to explain how to do it if you're interested. It's not perfect, but a little better than the original.

 

[wapiti]

I'm interested, I definitely like the second post better! Let's hear it...

 

[clutchkiller]

Thanks Wapiti, this is really easy to do… (I wouldn’t do it if I wanted a print larger than an 8 X 10)

The first thing I did was give the original image an 8 X 10 crop, then I went to the Image menu clicked on Image size and entered 300 as my resolution and chose Bicubic Sharper from the drop down menu. You can get away with doing this a couple of times before you start to see your pixels get messed up.

After you make your crop and other adjustments go to the layers palette and click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom, it’s the half black and half white icon, and click on Color Balance from the pop up menu.

When the Color Balance box appears adjust your Cyan and Blue sliders until the sky looks like a believable blue (if you slide the cyan slider to far to the left it doesn’t look to good).

Press the letter X and then Option-Delete if you are a Mac user, or Alt-Backspace if you are using Windows. Doing this sets the foreground color to black and then fills your adjustment layer mask black… hiding the blue.

Press the letter X again to set your foreground color to white now. Press the letter B to get the Brush tool and choose a medium to large diameter brush. When you click on your left mouse button you will see the blue again. Reveal a little at a time incase you go over an object that you do not want to be blue (if you accidentally make something blue, you can go to the Edit menu and click on Step Backward).

When you get close to an object you can use your Magic Wand tool like I did in the image below…

You can adjust the Opacity and Fill sliders from the layers palette to get your new sky looking natural. When you are done just flatten the image and save it.

I think the image below turned out a little nicer than the one I started this thread with (I took a little extra time with it).

A really quick and easy way to do almost the same thing is to duplicate an image after you make your crop. Adjust one image for the blue sky with the Channel Mixer or with Color Balance and do all of your post processing to the other. When you are done with both images, extract an object from the image with the bad sky (this works if you want to darken a background too) and drag and drop it right over the same object in the image with the good sky. I taught myself how to do that when I was using Microsoft Digital Image Suite… it’s quick and easy but I think you will get better results doing it the other way.

 

[wtnhunt]

Nice shot there. Think I like your second one better too.

Wonder if this should maybe be pinned in with the other helpful tutorials?