How To Fix Dreaded Polarizer Sky

[@JackMoskowitz]

Much better (and faster) than what I've been doing for years. BTW, I love the TK Actions panel. Using it more and more.

[@klausschleicher523]

YES, this technique is very helpful to me. Thanks a lot Sean! I have so many images with this ugly polarizer effect and I had no idea how to fix it. My approaches ended not so well.

[@desertgecko4549]

Nice technique, and very creative. Correcting an unevenly polarized sky is now also possible in Lightroom using a grad filter with luminosity masking, and it's done in a fraction of the time with only a few clicks and the drag of a slider. But tbh I've not tried it on an extreme case, just photos needing at most moderate correction. I'll keep this method in mind also. Thanks.

[@desertgecko4549]

@Steve West I used it only where the sky wasn't terribly uneven. I just don't often use a CPL on very wide lenses, preferring instead to shoot panos for stitching. After watching this vid and posting my comment, I dug up an old photo with a badly uneven sky to play with. A grad with lum masking alone couldn't do it, so l dropped a radial in the corner and lum masked it, feathered it, and adjusted it just right to get a portion the grad alone couldn't quite get. I was brightening a dark corner, so I also warmed the rad a hair and used the rad brush to erase the effect on the trees beneath it. In all this took a mere long minute (sounds more complicated than it is). In all, it's pretty simple and fast. The results aren't perfect (although close), but neither is a sky, which is always brighter in the direction of the sun. Still, if I were working on a fine art piece, I'd probably use Sean's technique.

[@lauramacky4083]

Fantastic solution. I had been isolating the sky and pulling it down below the horizon but I like this much better.

[@RichardRostant1]

Just got back from Scotland and had this polarizer issue on some of my favorites images. Was afraid they weren't usable. Thanks, Sean.

[@emilebaudot904]

Great tutorial again Sean & helpful just at the right time ..! I use the TK panel for most of my work in Ps and the time it saves is tremendous...👍🏻

[@gaperklake]

Excellent and truly useful tutorial, Sean. Thank you,

[@wademorales]

Amazing tutorial Sean! Always enjoy them

[@JF-fn2jq]

Thanks for another outstanding video Sean! Well produced, informative, and very helpful for me! The TK actions panel has been an important part of my post processing. Your excellent vids have really helped me understand how to get the most out of my photographs! Thanks again!!

[@SeanBagshaw]

John Fritz Right on! So glad to know that the vids and panel are useful for you!

[@MatthewUseda]

Thank you so much for this! This was really helpful. Though I have never heard of the TK panel.

[@SeanBagshaw]

You bet! If interested, more info on the TK panel can be had at goodlight.us

[@kreygscott]

Fantastic Sean. Much appreciated.😀😀😀😀✅✅✅❤️❤️❤️👍👍👍💯💯💯🏆🏆🏆👌👌👌📸📸📸

[@andreaknobel]

Really useful and well explained. Thanks for sharing!

[@davidroberts5535]

Great technique Sean. Thank you!!!

[@adrianalfordphotography]

Great video Sean, thanks for sharing 👍🙏

[@troyliposec9931]

Can't wait to try this out. Thanks, Sean!

[@KGi4]

Excellent tip. Love it. Thank you for sharing ;)

[@MaciejMarkiewicz]

Thank for that video Sean.

[@MaximPodbereznyy]

Thumbs up for the T-shirt! :)

[@SeanBagshaw]

Maxim Podbereznyy Word!!

[@ZeeKay80]

I dont think his wife watches his videos :D

[@rudeboymendo]

I am seeing banding when I do this. Do you not have this issue? THe TK action is less so than the standard but it still will show up in a large print.

[@SeanBagshaw]

Any adjustments made to smooth color gradients such as a blue sky are prone to banding. Working on a 16-bit image file is important. Also, in PS make sure that you zoom in to 66-100% to evaluate banding. The previews below 66% that PS generates often show banding that isn't actually there. However, when making significant adjustments to smooth color gradients sometimes banding is unavoidable.

[@stevedell4617]

Love your t-Shirt!!

[@SeanBagshaw]

Steve Dell Haha! A gift from my wife. I wondered who would comment first. 😆

[@photomech]

What if you have opposite problem from the polarizer overly dark blue sky

[@SeanBagshaw]

There are many things, but maybe start with the technique I show but use screen mode to lighten instead. If the ski is evenly dark you could also just pull up the blue luminance slider in the HSL tab of Lr or Camera Raw.

[@stuartschaffner9744]

Very useful, nicely done, and carefully explained. I know it will help me. I don’t know if anyone would find this useful, but I dimly recall some techniques for removing soft shadows on painted surfaces, like on cars. I believe I saw some videos on either PHLEARN or PTC on this. Briefly, you can use a curves or levels adjustment layer to change one specific color precisely into another specific color. Since you are using smooth curves, textures and colors similar to the targeted one are smoothly transformed as well. This is a bit like your hue-sat adjustment layer with the multiply blending mode, but perhaps easier to set up and tweak. The rest of the technique follows yours; you use a feathering or sometimes even a gradient mask to apply the transformation 100% in some areas and shading smoothly down to 0% in others. I ‘ll poke around to see if I can find a reference.

[@stuartschaffner9744]

I looked around but couldn't find the instructional video that explained this approach. So, I worked it out myself. Understand that this isn't something I invented out of whole cloth. The idea has been around for a long time, but in different contexts. Suppose you have an image layer in Photoshop that has an uneven sky. The problem is that, other than the uneven sky color, the sky is featureless. At worst it has some clouds that shouldn't be altered that much. The goal is to get rid of the very gradual change in sky color without introducing artifacts. You all know how hard this is since the human visual system is so good at finding patterns. As Sean has so clearly shown, the blur filters are your friends here, as are very soft brushes with very small flows. Now simplify how we describe the problem. We have a sky area where some parts are a particular RGB value L and other parts are another particular value D. We want the bright areas to be transformed to dark colors, and we want this transformation to wane in a smooth gradient. You do that with a mask of course! The mask is almost pure white over the center of the L region and pure black in the D regions. Just about everything I ever learned about making those masks I learned from Sean, so see how he does that. Use the eyedropper tool to sample the L and D areas and get RGB values from each. Suppose for example that L is rgb(114,124,176) and D is rgb(67,72,120). In Photoshop, generate a curves adjustment layer. Add a center point to each of the R, G, and B curves. Don't neurose about where. In turn, select each center point and set the Input value to the L value for that color and the Output value to the D value for that color. I assume that you already have an all-white mask for the adjustment layer. Then you will see that the former L region will now look like the D region used to look, and everything else will look weird. At this point, change the mask to all black and use all the magic Sean has described to build a proper mask. Note that while colors close to L will be changed to be close to D, other colors will be modified less. If you want a particular color X to be totally unaffected, add points for x on the R, G, and B curves and force them to be on the diagonal. Good luck, but that's the official method. I did try this on an image from the Petrified Forest in Arizona, where I had really clobbered the sky with a polarizer. There were little puffy white clouds that seemed almost completely unaffected by all this, even without pinning extra points to the diagonal.

[@SeanBagshaw]

@@stuartschaffner9744 Wow! That sounds pretty cool Stuart. I'll have to see if I can follow that. Maybe you should make a video for the rest of us? :-D

[@SeanBagshaw]

OK, Stuart. I just tried it and it worked for me too! Love it!

[@stuartschaffner9744]

Sean Bagshaw , as I said, I have learned much from you. So, this is a tiny payback. Cheers!

[@SuperMebes]

Excelent solution. I tried it , however banding problems appears several times and I'd like to solve this drawback but I do not know how to do it.

[@SeanBagshaw]

Hi Marcelo - Banding can certainly be an issue in smooth skies. First, make sure that you are working on a 16-bit image not 8-bit. 8-bit images will definitely show banding if you do this kind of adjustment to a blue sky. Second, if the blue channel is blown out in the bright parts of your sky in the original image file then darkening it can cause banding to appear. Finally, zoom into 100% to make sure the banding is actually there. Sometimes what you see in PS is an 8-bit preview of the image. If you zoom all the way in to 100% magnification this forces PS to generate a full 16-bit view. If this is the case you will see that there wasn't actually any banding there. But sometimes it just isn't possible to recover those bright parts of the sky without banding. :-)

[@spookysandwich1355]

Awesome technique , one question is it the same method to lighten selected areas as appose to darkening them ? like for talk sake in astro you can get darken edges due to the wide angle , so can i lighten them with this technique ?

[@SeanBagshaw]

Camera Phill Sure, just use the Screen blending mode instead of Multiply.

[@spookysandwich1355]

@@SeanBagshaw perfect thank you kindly sir :)

[@SuperMebes]

I think so: instead to use multiply blending mode, try the screen mode. it worked for me

[@iroddo]

Thank you for the video!.... Hey just wondering what's your computer set up ? :)

[@SeanBagshaw]

Rodrigo Baez Thanks! I’m on a PC. It’s few years old now but i7 cpu, GeForce 970 gpu, 32 gigs ram, 1 TB solid state OS drive, 11TB data drive, liquid cooled.

[@lauraemerson413]

Hi Sean, That's a nice fix, thank you :-) but I'm wondering if it might cause banding in the sky that might show on a print? Because when I do this sort of stuff in the sky, visualization curves reveal banding. Do you normally run checks on your images with solar curves?

[@SeanBagshaw]

Hi Laura. This could certainly lead to banding in some cases. However, working in ProPhoto RGB and 16 bit helps. I don't tend to check with curves...I just check with my eyes. If I can't see banding on screen or in a print then it's good enough for me. :-)

[@lauraemerson413]

​@@SeanBagshaw Many thanks for your response, Sean. I'm already working in 16-bit+ noise, and I'll try working in ProPhotoRGB as well. Banding is really fiendish to get rid of in retouched blue skies. I have found that if it shows in solar curves, even very slightly, then it will show on the print, the more so the larger the print. True, it might require looking at the print with a magnifying glass and an LED light, and it will not be visible to most people but still, from a purist point of view, it's a problem...

[@lauraemerson413]

​ @Sean Bagshaw Argh sorry for obsessing...!!

[@KenToney]

I have this issue when doing moving Timelapse, and with variable ND’s.

[@SeanBagshaw]

Ken Toney now that could be a tough one to deal with. Not sure of the fix for that.

[@DavidJohnstonPhoto]

Yesss! This was always my biggest bugaboo when I first started shooting. Is bugaboo still a cool word to use?

[@SeanBagshaw]

David Johnston totally an good word.

[@garyjjanb]

Why use the polarizing filter at all?

[@Cowicide]

He specifically explains why in the video. You may want to re-watch it.

[@Dstonephoto]

This is gimmicky, at best. You can’t artificially recreate polarisation (without advanced computational tech) post capture. I think you need to use rear filters. This technique works, but it’s misleading to imply the effect is the same. The bigger question is whether we could design adaptive curved polarizers . Or we can just filter from the rear. The problem this introduces is that you’re artificially introducing a digitally perfect mask which kills the delicious entropic nature of natural light. It works but eh… Do we really want to further introduce additional (poorly) interpolated artefacts? Yeah, I’ll admit im probably totally overthinking this, but I think it’s a point worth considering. We might as well just superimpose fake skies then and call it a day. Either way, brilliant explanation.

[@SeanBagshaw]

All I can say is that it has come in handy for me many times. Results will vary and it doesn't always work, but if I can get a result that I like better I'm not sure why I wouldn't. I'm not advocating...just sharing. I leave it up to you to decide if it is useful for you or not.

[@Dstonephoto]

@@SeanBagshaw You're spot on. And I probably worded my statement less harshly than I did. I feel like the person who just lectured someone on what goes inside a delicious hot dog. We need to find out if we can ghetto-rig a cheap linear polarizer sheet cutout to the rear element of the ultrawides as means of circumventing those absurd front-mounted filter holders. edit: my bad. I butchered that apology. sure you got the gist

[@UTAZCO.Overland]

Or... Don't use a polarizer when photographing skies? :) I've been using my polarizer only on windows and water lately, and have been happier ever since ;)

[@glennmiller2116]

#armcandy hahahahahahahahaha! I feel your pain...

[@SeanBagshaw]

It’s rough. 😆😆