Photoshop tutorial - Post processing: Make dramatic skies

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This easy Photoshop post-processing technique shows how to make dramatic skies, similar to having a circular polarizer filter on the camera. This simply darkens the sky to better reveal your clouds.

It’s best used in landscapes, cityscapes and can be applied to add drama to any sort of photograph.

Before & After

1- Add a new Adjustment layer “Selective Color” to darken the Cyans

2- Add a new Adjustment layer “Selective Color” to darken the Blues

3- Done!

Optionally, on top of it you can add a Gradient map (black to white) in soft light at around 10-20% to really add to it.

Your layer stack should look like something like this now:

This technique used the cyans and the blues to give a dramatic sky. It can be applied to any type of photo to remove some colors casts that are rather annoying. Have a look at the next example where I applied the same technique only to yellows and greens:

The colors look more realistic as if you had a polarizer on the lens and that less photons got captured.

That’s all, cheers!

PS: this tutorial was inadvertently deleted! … it might now be slightly different than the original…
Read more post-processing tutorials here.

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