I have been using Floras technique to blue the skies of old faded photographs with great success. Recently though, I have noticed that when I blue the sky, I often loose something else in the picture.

c'mon guys, you gotta post bigger picture sizes.

so, what is it you felt you lost? we cant tell without a before and after.

craig

I have been using Floras technique to blue the skies of old faded photographs with great success. Recently though, I have noticed that when I blue the sky, I often loose something else in the picture.

I'm not quite sure what you're after and I couldn't find Floras technique--hopefully she'll pop in to say. :)

I just added a levels adjustment layer and slid the gamma sliders of the R,G,B channels over towards the right which simply darkens the image, but since red and green are fairly blown, I slid the blue slider less which helps bring out the blue. Used the select color range to make a mask for this layer to prevent the shadows from being too dark.

HSL layer to tweak the ground color slightly.

Finally, a raster layer filled with sky blue and an image-based mask applied to replace the white part of the sky with the sky blue--adjusted the opacity of the layer to taste.

Bart

I went another route. I moved the photo into lab mode. I started with a levels adjustment layer and on top of that a curves adjustment layer. Using curves I just rotated the a and b channels counter clockwise to increase the color intensity.

Sort of a purple sky. I have no idea of what shade the sky should be in this photo.

I tried doing a save for web on the enhanced image, but all I could see was the blue of the sky. I flattened the image and got rid of the extra layers, but the save for web still only showed the blue. The sky should be blue, but I seem to be loosing some of the sand color in the forground. It shows up as white.

Attached is an unretouched photo. I need to make the sky blue and the sand-sand colored. Any good ideas?

Well Perhaps this is what you want. The sand was white since the colors were in the 255 range. I converted the picture to lab mode. Used a levels adjustment layer to increase contrast and darken some. On top of that I added a curves adjustment layer. I selected the b channel and increased the yellow considerably. To confine the correction to the yellow sand I used a Layer Style blending mode so that only the yellow part of the photo would be corrected.

See my short tutorial

Fixing blown out sky (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13348&highlight=blown)

I took the photo I had previously corrected and selected with the rectangular Marquis the sky. Then I used selective color adjustment layer and selected the whites and cranked up the cyan.

At the horizon there are some rough edges, but Swampy's technique is simple and very effective to work on colorless or bland skies.