Quick Lightroom Tip for Richer-Looking Skies

If the skies in your landscape or travel photos look kind of blah and washed out (typical when shooting on some bright sunny days), here’s a quick, simple, and effective way to make your skies look much deeper blue and richer.

STEP ONE: Here’s the original image (taken on the island of Santorini, Greece), and the sky isn’t terrible, but it’s that light-blue almost kinda wants to be gray blah sky, and we want to go for something deeper and richer, so start in the Develop Module by clicking on the HSL panel (as shown above).

STEP TWO: In the HSL panel, click on “Luminance” (at the top right side of the panel) and then drag the Blue slider to the left and instantly your skies gets that nice deep rich blue. That’s it!

Above: here’s a side-by-side before/after in Lightroom, so you can see what a big difference that simple move made. 

NOTE: When you’re dragging that blue slider to the left, keep an eye out for noise in the sky — this technique tends to bring out any noise already in the image, so if you drag too far, you might see some noise start to appear. You won’t see it in every image, but just giving you a heads up that it’s something to keep an eye out for.

There ya go! Hope you all have an awesome Monday, and I hope to see you back here tomorrow. 🙂

Best,

-Scott