Replacing sky in photos. (making them more interesting)

Sometimes photos would look much better if you change sky, I will tell you why. So, sometimes you get pretty harsh lighting in you photo and you are trying to expose photo for highlights and then in post try to recover shadows in photo, but one important thing is shooting it in RAW. Photos sometimes can't handle that much data in photo and you end up with blown out highlights, mostly sky, and good foreground. When you end up in that situation, best thing is to add sky in post, if you got time for that, if not, try avoiding sky when you are taking photos.

There is one technique that requires time but your photos won't be artificially enhanced, that's taking photos in HDR (high dynamic range). You can do this by taking one photo that is overexposed, or you exposed for shadows, second one take with exposed for highlights and at the end let your camera chose what is best. These three photos can be merged into one, and you will get well exposed shadows and highlights. There are some software that's making HDR look pretty simple, just by adding these three photos and it will do job by its own.

What I like to do is replacing sky with something more interesting and try to blend sky with foreground, to get colors that matches to the scene. You also have some software that will do this for you, it's called Luminar, but it's not free. That software has great AI features like changing sky, one click enhancing colors and exposure and etc.

Here are my photos that got enhanced by Luminar, every photo was taken in RAW format for the best results at the end. I think that it done great job and all of that was edited in just few minutes. That's pretty fast and gives really great results.

Try it yourselves, you can get Luminar for 7 days trial. I hope you liked my photos and enjoyed watching them. :)