Blown out sky, need to change to blue!

Help.

We have some really great looking outdoor footage, the grass looks great, the actors look great, the props and houses look great, but sky is blown out. We need to make the sky blue. How can we do this? One issue we are having is that the drive way is hot as well. What can we do?

Depends on the shape of the sky. You could use a color gradient to blue it. That works quite well if you have a static shot with a horizon that supports it.

You can also use Color Corrector 3-way. Use secondary color correction to select the area of the sky. Soften it quite a bit to blend it better. If you're picking up other areas in the selection use two layers and crop or garbage matte off the other areas.



All the best,

Tom

Sorry, just to be a little more specific. Most of these are moving shots, ouch.

All suggestions would be great. Or if there is someone out there who would be willing to help us out on the project, we have some buget to work with.

Thanks,
Mike

Andrew Kramer recently published a great tute called "Sky Replacement" on Creative Cow. Check out [forums.creativecow.net]

I think you would get the best results running this job through After Effects.

I don't know if this will work, but if your sky is really blown out, you might try applying a luma key or even a color key to the sky. You also might try to apply a subtle blue grad. I think the main thing to remember is the viewer should be paying more attention to the actors than the sky...unless it's the subject of the dialogue...so ask yourself, will the fix ruin the moment? Also, it's one more reason to laugh when silly people say, "Don't worry, we'll fix it in post", when in fact they should have put some ND grad in front of the lens. Hey, but it takes two minutes to put on a filter, hours to fix attempt to fix it in post--go figure.

Chet Simmons
Las Vegas

You can do this in FCP

[www.kenstone.net]

--ken

Hi Ken,

Yes if you want to just put a grad over the footage, then you could. The tutorial I pointed to includes tracking footage that was shot with a moving camera and applying a cloud BG.

But yeah, the grad filter stuff on your site is pretty cool and might just get him what he wants.

Hey,

There are lots of tricks you can use. I have a large piece of black netting that I can put between the foreground actors and the background. I use it mostly for medium or closeup shots. It does two things...takes down the stop on things that are way hot in the background and softens the background, too.

While this is a FCP site, it seems it might be nifty if there was a shooting related forum. I do belong to cml, but LAFCPUG might be a more casual place to get information.


Best,
Chet Simmons

In After Effects, I have can pull clouds & blue sky from a blown out bkgd plate (90% of the time) by a applying & tweaking a combination Levels / Curves / Hue Saturation plug-ins.

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Thank you guys. We have taken a test clip and have put in blue sky with clouds in a moving shot. We are far from experts but seem to be happy with the result and will continue to fine tune our skills. Any more suggestions are welcome and thank you everyone for you help and input.