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Some of you may have seen me post this picture a year ago while early in my learning. I actually erased the sky and edited in a new pure blue sky which looked pretty fake. So I saw a neat tutorial and I tried it on this photo. I'm not going to say what I did, but I would like you to look at it and see if #1 it looks realistic and #2 if you can see the editing I did to it. (don't go back looking for the old post. I'll say what I did soon and post the unedited version

Bute Grand Canyon edit by mcarriganphotos, on Flickr

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Mike "The Squirrel"
Canon 550D | Canon EF 35mm 1:2 | Canon 50 f/1.8 II | Sigma 18-125mm DC OS | Tamron SP 70-300mm Di VC USD | Canon 430EX II
Military Issued Canon 40D | Canon 55-250mm IS

only a guess on my part... but I would say you cut out the mountain and dropped in a new sky backround from another pic.. the only reason I say this is because there seems to be plenty of clouds of varying degrees in the pic with some quite darkish gray areas... yet there are no shadows on the mountain as one would expect with this type of cloud cover.. the lack of shadows on the landscape suggests a clear blue sky and the cloud cover would suggest at least some shadows on the ground.. this all goes out the window of course if there was a large patch of clear sky where the sun was agt but again.. the cloud formations do not suggest that.

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It is an interesting scene to start with and the snap is nicely balanced left to right. The sky to ground "seem" could use some softening, it is pronounced. There should be a tool in your app that "unsharps" or softens the edges of things. The foreground object upper edges need to look as though light is being scattered or diffused as it wraps around those edges. Also, in this scene it looks like the sun is brilliant and directly overhead on the ground, but the sky is fairly cloudy. I'm looking forward to your next post on this.

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I agree with Wolfsong where he says that the clouds should cast shadows to the landscape, it looks a bit unrealistic to me. As for the editing, I think you did a good job, but as MrCliff suggested, you might as well apply some unsharpening to the mountain edges, it looks a bit too sharp.

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So this is the original after cropping and even this one seems to have that sharp line from the hill to the sky. Unfortunately this was shot in JPEG and not RAW. Maybe I did over do brightness on the hill but honestly the clouds do throw it off. It was about 2 or 3 pm with the sun behind me and a storm moving in from behind the hill so that does make it look odd and that is why I wanted to make some changes to it. What I was really going for was to change the time and make it look like sunset. I really cranked up the vibrance and saturation to really bring out the red/orange that the original file does not show. The tutorial I watched was on how to use gradients to add color to clouds to make it look like sunset. So I used a gradient straight down with Orange and another from the left corner with yellow to add the sunset colors. I may go all the way back to the original again and start over. Once I saw the tutorial I went back to the edited Photoshop file to put in those gradients and don't know all the other changes made to the file (I now know how to use layers)

Bute Unedited by sherpa1d, on Flickr

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Mike "The Squirrel"
Canon 550D | Canon EF 35mm 1:2 | Canon 50 f/1.8 II | Sigma 18-125mm DC OS | Tamron SP 70-300mm Di VC USD | Canon 430EX II
Military Issued Canon 40D | Canon 55-250mm IS