Fix that Overexposed Sky

Isn't it frustrating? You need overcast skies to get great pictures - that is, one with no sun or shadow streaks on the face and to avoid squinting, but then you get a blah white/gray sky. Guess what? You can fix that! MCP Actions has a great blue sky action you can purchase, but for those of you willing to take a few steps, you can achieve this on your own. Ready to try?

1) Using the Lasso Tool draw a rough boundary around the whole sky (yes, you can use the Magic Wand tool, but you won't always get this to work just right). If you image has an object dividing the sky into pieces, like mine does, you'll have to repeat this process.

2) Create a new layer and name it Sky.

3) In the Select menu, choose Color Range and bump the Fuzziness up to 100 (you can adjust this, but generally it's a safe setting for most pictures). Click OK. (This grabs your sky more exact...like the Magic Wand could do, but without leaving some sections out).

4) Now you need to set your foreground and background colors. Use foreground light blue (like 204, 221, 247) and the background to dark blue (like 148, 188, 239). You can play around with this, but these are general sky colors that should work for most photos.

5) Pick the Gradient Tool (if you can't find it, your Fill button might be showing). Choose the Radial gradient mode (which is the second one from the left with dark on the edges and white in the center).

6) With the sky layer selected, draw a line from point A (bottom left corner works) to point B (top right corner). It painted in the sky, but you aren't quite done.

7) Use Ctrl-T to transform and drag the bottom of the fake sky down to overlap any landscape area. Stretching the sky helps avoid a white border. You can also set the sky layer to Darken (vs. Normal) if you feel it needs more general transition. I didn't in this photo, but for a true landscape shot, this would be better.

Pretty easy, huh? And for me even taking a few shortcuts in my picture, the general look still looks great.