Outside during the day, except for the sun itself, the sky is the brightest thing you see and your eye and mind (marvelous things that they are) compensate for the sky's greater brightness and give you a more balanced perception than is there in reality. However, digital sensors are not so adaptive and while they give you what is probably a more accurate representation of reality, the skies they produce are typically much brighter than how your eye and mind interpreted them and people respond more to a photo that looks like how the scene was perceived and remembered than how it was in reality.

So, since we want greater response to our photos, we generally want to darken the skies in them.

In the physical world, photographers often use gradient filters to do this. This has the big advantage of reducing the risk of clipping the brightest tones to pure white, but at the same time it darkens everything in the area of the frame effected by the gradient filter, like the tops of trees that extend into the sky. This is not good because it isn't how your eye and mind perceived it.

So, what we actually want to do is darken the sky without darkening everything else that appears against it.

In the digital world, this can be done a number of ways with image editing software. One of my favorite ways (because it is easy and fast) is by using a procedure I think of as the Software Gradient Filter Technique and is described here.

Which editor to use is your choice but it does require being able to adjust the tone curve of the image. In Photoshop (my image editor of choice) this function is called 'Curves' and where possible I use Adjustment Layers in order to leave the original image untouched. So for this technique, I use a Curves Adjustment Layer on a gradient mask, but the Curves command applied to a direct gradient selection will also work but unfortunately will change the pixels of the original image.

Anyway, for this technique to work most effectively, none of the tones in the sky should be clipped to pure white. This is much easier to achieve if you shoot in RAW format which allows some recovery of clipped tones if they occur, but a properly exposed JPEG will also work, of course.

Click on the 'Bridge-Original' image below to continue...