Before & After: Ominous Skies

I love taking pictures of dramatic skies! During tornado season in Texas, there’s no shortage of them. This article will quickly take you through my editing process for a dramatic sky.

I grabbed this shot (SOOC) the other day before a storm, right at sunset.

I like the dynamic of the sky, but I want more contrast and I don’t like that someone’s chimney is peaking through the tree. I rotated the shot and cropped it to focus more on the different clouds and to remove the distraction.

When I get a shot with just the sky and clouds in them, I always try out my ACR Skies Preset Pack to see how they look. Among other adjustments, the presets punch up the blacks and exposure quite a bit to accentuate the contrast. For this shot, the “Extra Dramatic Skies” preset looked the best with a few minor tweaks.

After that I brought the image into Photoshop and decided to play around with some textures. I’m not as texture-happy in my editing as I once was, but skies are one subject I still love to creatively edit. I use MCP Actions’ Texture Applicator Action which I’ve tweaked to fit my workflow. I’ve given the action a keyboard shortcut, which makes it super easy to apply textures to any photograph.

Though I have a lot of textures, I almost always come back to Patti Brown’s Kaleidoscope textures. For this image I used Red Hot Dream (overlay 45%) and Sublime Glow (screen 5%) to give the photo an eerie red and ominous feel to it.

My final result: