Joel Tjintjelaar

People often compliment me on the skies I use in my pictures, usually followed by the question “How did you do that?”

Well, first of all, there are basically two ways to capture a sky:

1. Without the use of a ND filter;
2. With the use of a ND filter.

To make those skies really pop, you’ll need to use some Photoshop techniques that I’ll explain in this tutorial.

Part 1 of this tutorial is for those who don’t have a ND filter, but still want to get an amazing sky. Part 2 is a bit more advanced and requires that you have a ND filter. Or perhaps you’re planning on buying an ND filter and you want to see what some of the possibilities are.

— Lighthouse with dramatic sky

A plain, blue sky

There are a plenty black and white photographers out there who find a plain, blue sky boring. Mostly because they don’t know what to do with them. When they convert to black and white, the sky becomes a big gray area.

— Basilica Oudenbosch

— Basilica BW Tool Gray Sky

Creating a black and white image is more than just converting the image to black and white. For this image I used the built in Black & White tool that Photoshop offers (Image à Adjustments à Black & White). I didn’t change any presets and pressed OK. Notice the gray sky.

There is a quick and easy way to make the sky more interesting. Drag the Blues slider to the complete left. Or click on the sky with your left mouse button, hold down and drag to the left. The sky will darken and goes black.

— Basilica Oudenbosch BW

Silver Efex Pro vs the Black & White tool

However, the picture isn’t quite correct yet. As you can see in the left corner, there are many black spots. I could clone this out. In this case it would have been an easy fix. But I’m just not that big a fan of cloning things out. It’s such a precise work and it’s just, unnecessary and time consuming. And I just think that you need to use the digital darkroom that Photoshop is, in the same way as you would use the conventional dark room: to improve your images and not to manipulate your images. The photo is also an example where Photoshop’s built in Black & White plug-in seems to fail. Although I think this tool is perfect for beginners, it has his problems. I won’t go in detail about those problems, but you can see that it sometimes creates this weird noise.

The above problem is one of the reasons why I use Silver Efex Pro. It handles the black and white conversion better.

Don’t worry too much about the noise: these problems happen, but not on regular basis. Besides, the clone tool is your friend.

— Silver Efex Pro

Select the red filter under “color filters” and your sky will go completely black. You might want to play around with the sliders a bit. In this case I increased the contrast and decrease the brightness. This way the overall contrast gets even bigger.

Although Silver Efex Pro gives better results than the Black & White tool, it isn’t that relevant for this tutorial. Just remember that a blue sky can turn into a great, black sky instead of a boring, gray sky.

Using a gradient in your plain skies

Complete black skies work great in architectural shots. Your landscape shots might not really improve with a completely black sky.

— Dunes Color

Converting this image to black and white with a black sky, just doesn’t work for me.

— Dunes Black Sky

— Dunes Gray Sky

And a gray sky doesn’t work either: the picture is just too gray overall.
There’s a quick fix for this.
1. Create a new layer.
2. Select the Gradient tool.
3. Make sure to select “Foreground to Transparent”

— Foreground To Transparent

4. You might need to change the foreground color of the gradient to black.
Click on the gradient and gradient editor will open.

— Gradient

5. Click once on the bottom left triangle and then you can change your color.

— Gradient Edit

End result:

— Grass… by Joel Tjintjelaar, on Flickr

You can see that the gradients make the sky more interesting. This is also the case in general: B&W images that have all sorts of gradients are very aesthetical. In all my images I always try to include at least one part of the image that has a gradient from light to dark tones.

Cloudy skies

There are several kinds of cloudy skies, but I’m going to discuss just two kinds:
1. Complete cloudy, no sky visible
2. Clouds and sky both visible
Type 1 skies: just clouds, no sky

— Sky Stump

A gray sky like this can look boring because it looks so flat.
To make it look more interesting isn’t that hard.
Step 1: convert the image to black and white.
Step 2: dodge and burn the clouds like crazy. You want to increase the contrast in the clouds, so make the highlights even brighter and make the shadows even darker.
Step 3 (optional): increase the contrast of the image to make the sky even more dramatic.

— Stumbled upon a Stump by Joel Tjintjelaar, on Flickr

With some heavy dodging and burning I turned the sky into something spectacular. You can read more about dodging and burning right here

Type 2 skies: both sky and clouds

— Castle smaller

In this image I have both sky and clouds. Making this into a good looking black and white sky isn’t that hard. Simply follow the steps under “A plain, blue sky”.
You can use the Black & White tool and drag down the Blues slider. Or you can use Silver Efex Pro and apply a Red filter.

— Castle BW smaller

Conclusion

There are different ways to make your skies look better in black and white, depending on the sky you captured and what you want to achieve.
I hope this tutorial has helped you to make your skies pop.
In part 2 of this series, I’m going to discuss how to make skies like the picture at the bottom. See you there!

— Time Lapse II by Joel Tjintjelaar

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