An experiment with over-saturation
A gorgeous cloud-filled sky gave me a reason to get outdoors and play around with over-saturating landscapes.
To get this particular effect, I used my circular polarizer to make the sky as blue as possible and then underexposed a stop-and-a-half to make sure I would have enough detail in the clouds. I shot this as a raw file, to make sure I would have a lot of flexibility in toning the clouds and to make the next part of the process easier. I opened this image in Lightroom 2 (have I ever told you how fantastic this program is?) and, after doing basic toning to bring out the maximum detail in the clouds, I bumped up the saturation of the blues and greens…a lot.
Once I had adjusted the color to match reality, I took the settings an additional 20 points to the right on the Lightroom saturation slider for these two colors to over-saturate things even more. The resulting over-saturated image is much more eye-catching than had I not used a polarizer and a little software “help” after the fact.
Go try it for yourself the next time you have a cloud-filled, beautiful sky. Don’t worry if you don’t have Lightroom 2, you can accomplish the same color tweaks using the Adobe Raw plug-in and Photoshop. Make your adjustments within Adobe Raw using the controls under the “HSL/grayscale” tab. Have fun learning this new technique!
