Studio222 loves Big Skies!
Hello dear friends! I am hiding out inside today because, as the last Saturday before Christmas, I know the outside world is crazy today! We have actually finished pretty much all of our holiday shopping. I think I just need some more stocking stuffers, and a few gifts for our family and we’ll be done! But, I plan on venturing out during the week sometime when the malls are less crazy.
Recently I have been asked by a lot of people how we get our skies to look the way they do in pictures. I am so flattered by the question because bold skies are one of our favorite things to shoot and we take a lot of pride in the images! I’m not going to lie to you, a lot of the magic happens in the camera. A good quality lens will help a lot as well! I know you were wishing for some secret Photoshop trick but I don’t really have one for you. You have got to get your pictures looking good straight out of the camera if you want them to look good after they’ve been edited. There’s only so much you can do with a poorly taken picture. So, step one: make sure you have got your settings down in camera! The editing is the easy part! We use Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS3 for our post processing and we have a storehouse of textures, actions, and presets that we use for our work. For our big sky pictures, we generally use the actions from Totally Rad.
Here is a before and after from one of our recent big sky portraits with our camera settings and actions of choice:
Now go out there and capture those gorgeous skies all around you!
Happy Holidays!
Your before and after posts are great! Love to see your TRA mixes. Thanks guys and show more! :)
Thank you for the before and after. Always appreciate the sharing of tips…
Good question. :)
We are forever grateful for the photographers who helped us learn and grow and we always want to be helpful for others who are refining their abilities.
Why show people the way to make your pictures?
Thanks for this post guys! I am always in awe of the pictures you take and I appreciate getting to see some of the behind the scenes work on it. Please do more of these! :-)
Beautiful photos, great idea putting the settings on the shots.
Thanks for sharing! It’s so nice to see photographers who are confident enough in their skills to share their tricks with others! Thanks for being amazing!
This was my favorite shot from the post you did on this wedding. Awesome. :)
I love that you did this! I need tips like these more often, please. :) -Alli