Curvemeister Forum

I have posted a few images here.  One problem I have is the sun.  Sometimes I shoot towards the sun and the sky goes white.  Duh.  In this pano, the only choice is early morning (too foggy) mid day terrible sun, evening a little better.  I tried 10 am.  The sky is light blue on the left and darker and more saturated on the left. 

Any suggestions?

Steve, I'll give this one a try later, but this is typically where HDR comes to the party :)

But...
HDR with a PANO is a good trick...

Thinking...How about a mask with a gradient and some light painting on the mask to even it out a bit.
Something like this...
Curved in Lab to make the sky color match more from the middle right.  L channel for tone.

Greg

I tried hdr pano.  Has to be on a tripod.  kinda messy.  Get the best one done flat, then copy settings and do each.  Then save and then do pano.  But this one I used tilt shift.  I guess I could do focus bracketed hdr pano.  More software /hardware is a little slow when it comes to hdr.  Seven hdr's would take a while.

Seriously, this has come up more than once.  With a 180 degree or so pano you get from deep blue to white.  I think it is lens flare.  This has "ruined" (not really) several images. 

I had trouble marking the the blueish clouds with a white sky.  You can see only a 220 k file.  The purpose is to print larger.  There are some small spots on the image that will be very interesting when it is large.  But large shows artifacts.  I need my "A" game when doing this.

I think I need to hand paint the mask.  Get as good a start as I can then blur the artifacts then paint paint.  Curving and masking in CM by itself has not worked for me.

Greg, that look is great. Steve, does it really mater if theres a reasonable small change in the blue sky?

Thanks Greg, that was good.  I will try it again. 

Ganna -  I have taken blank 255,255,255 skies and pinned it.  Result was a constant blue throughout the sky.  It is not natural looking. 

I set a hue clock about middle of the frame in the blue sky.
With the gradient mask on a layer, I used Curvemeister to curve down the bright end of the sky to the same values as the original pin not the adjusted values.  So the LAB values on the left matched the original values on the middle for color and tone.  After I had the tone and color I hand brushed on the gradient mask with a very large soft brush @ 20% until I was satisfied.

Greg