What’s wrong with this picture?

Never underestimate the power of a great sky to turn a mundane photograph into a visually compelling one. The problem with this picture is the dull sky. It is as boring as it could possibly be. I took this picture during the Parade of Ships off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, and unfortunately the organizers of the event never think about photographers and what we need to make strong images. The parade took place between 9am and noon. They couldn’t have chosen a worse time.

The problem in replacing the sky is the fine detail in the rigging of the ships. You can’t use any of the selection tools to cut around that kind of element. The only way to address the problem is to use one of the blend modes in Photoshop.

The composite on the next page isn’t as dramatic as a sunrise or sunset would be, but it’s a lot better than the original.

To make this composite, I pasted the cloud image over the background shot of the tall ships. I then experimented with all the blend modes (they are found in the layers palette) until I liked what I saw. Usually the blend mode multiply is the choice that works best. However, it makes the combination of images too dark, so I opened the Levels dialog box (Image > adjustments > levels) and worked the mid-toned slider and the highlight slider until the exposure was correct.

Finally, in ACR, I added clarity and a bit of vibrance to increase the visual impact of the image. §