Tutorial: Color the sky with Lightroom

Do you use Adobe Lightroom for your image editing? Here I’ll quickly show you how to get some more color on that bland sky. 

If I have a photo like this one, where the skies are a bit bland and boring, instead of changing the saturation of the whole image, I pull down the blue luminance slider. It makes the blue more dark and can really help to lift the sky in a photo.

You go from this…

…via this…

…to this.

This is basically all you need to do.

I also sharpened the image.

Here’s the tip: Drop the blue luminance to add some color to the sky. That’s it! That’s all you have to do to improve a photo were the sky is a bit dull.

Of course I didn’t stop there (though I could have):

In the basic menu of Lightroom I also changed the setting for both black and white to get rid of some of the spots that were burnt out (hold in the alt/option key while dragging the slider – that way you can see the problematic areas). See image IMG_4644 and IMG_4644-3 to see the difference – you can easily spot it in the ice below the waterfall on the left side of the image.
Then I added some mid-tones by changing the clarity.
Finally I sharpened up the image.