Replacement Sky Images required

[tmurphy]

Whent to Scotland earlier this week and took around 100 images from the top of a mountain that I happened to stop near. The day was REALLY sunny and bright, so i got the usual overexposure of the sky etc. and forgot to shoot some shots just of the sky correctly exposed!

'No worries' I said to myself, I've got a load of stock sky images to drop into the image.
On return I can't find the CD..I've had it for about 2 years, they where all downloaded from a free site, but I can't remember what it was..sure it was somthing to do with a girls name

Anybody know of any decent (they need to be very varied images) sites that allow free use of stock sky images?

thanks

Tony

[Ken Fournelle]

Make your own. Replace the sky with a blue shade and with paint in clouds with any number of brushes you can find on the web. Adobe has a number of them: http://share.studio.adobe.com/default.asp

Can you post an image?

K

[Gary Richardson]

How badly blown out are your sky areas, it may be possible to recover them using a masked curves or levels adjustment. If you can post one of your images it would help to see if thats possible.

[Flora]

Hi Tony,

Welcome to RP!

.. Couldn't guess what the " girls name " could be ... but you can surely re-build your stock here ... and here

[tmurphy]

This is one of the images (resized as the originals are from an 8MP DSLR)

[Xaran]

I assume that you did not take the pictures in RAW format - this would allow you to adjust the exposure afterwards and with Russell Browns new addin for CS2 you can place 2 raw images in the same PSD file with different exposure adjustments.

Christine

[tmurphy]

Originally Posted by Xaran

I assume that you did not take the pictures in RAW format - this would allow you to adjust the exposure afterwards and with Russell Browns new addin for CS2 you can place 2 raw images in the same PSD file with different exposure adjustments.

I did take a few in RAW on the way back down...could you elaborate on the RB addin?

[Gary Richardson]

hi Tony, did a very quick levels adjustment on your image, then a seperate levels adjustment for the sky (applied graduated layer mask).

Data in sky is a bit scarce, so image has posterised. This may be just on the posted image due to file size restrictions, full size image may not suffer from this problem.

[Nacoya]

Hiya Tony (and all),

Hope you don't mind me having a go at this.
I'm less than a novice and am frequently looking for help in here so any opportunity i get i have a go.
I got a replacement sky and by placing it in a higher layer than the background and using a layer mask to mask the area i needed, and added a bit more cyan to the sky to try and match it, i applied it to the original image (that's my go in the first pic). I didn't touch anything else on your photo and tried to blend the sky using colour balance into the already present 'haze' at the top of the distant hills.
Then in the 2nd pic(i had to resize again to get it under the posting limits) i took the liberty of making some changes by eye, removing noise, sharpening and colour balance/curves. Which is absolutely the wrong thing for me to do as i have no where near the required level of skill to know if it is good or bad or indeed when to stop, but what the heck i did it so i may as well post it.
Anyway here they are.

PS. i Live in central scotland (just thought i'd throw that in for good measure )

cheers,

nacoya

[Xaran]

Check out www.russellbrown.com - you will find the addin script for CS2 Bridge and the movies to explain how it works.

Christine

[tmurphy]

Thanks to everybody's suggestions and tips

I'll have a play over the next day or two and post the resuting image(s)