A great sky can save a photograph. The quest is to find the right type of clouds, the right number of clouds and (of course) the right lighting. We didn’t have any clouds today so the problem to be solved is how to divide up the sky to avoid the blank areas.
A few months ago Adobe unveiled their “sky replacement filter.” Not happy with the sky in your image? Adobe can help you replace that bland sky with something dramatic. You have multiple choices of Adobe clouds or maybe a cloud formation you photographed. The technology is very sophisticated and it works.
This doesn’t bother me too much, because in the early days of photography, blue sensitive emulsions required two negatives for a photograph. You needed an exposure for the blue sky and clouds and then another exposure for the foreground. The two negatives would be printed on the same piece of paper separately to get a proper exposure for the scene. Sometimes photographers would use the same clouds in multiple images. Photographers even traded (or sold) good sky negatives to other photographers. It’s a photographic tradition updated to the twenty first century.
It didn’t take long for me to exploit this function. The April 1, 2022 Lipka Journal contained a project where all the photographs used the sky replacement tool, and because it was April 1, I used the same sky for each replacement. No one told me they noticed the same clouds in every image.
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