I also wondered about changing a sky on an editorial photo (the London one), but we are not photo journalists and the image doesn’t really misrepresent anything about the buildings or the typical London skyline so I’m pretty sure that is OK. The clear downside is that the agencies will start to get multiple shots that basically have the same sky and will probably cry foul at some point. I chose The Landscape Photographer’s guide to Photoshop, which is normally about $40. The current Black Friday deal gives you a free pack of 25 more sunsets (plus a free eBook from Rocky Nook). In the basic set of skies provided, there are 30 different images and you can flip them and obviously alter the white balance etc. The first question is whether you have the rights to sell the image? The stock agencies usually insist that all elements in the picture are your own work and the skies here clearly aren’t. Now what are the issues for stock photography – doing these changes to make fine art prints is one thing – selling them for stock is another. I’m not saying this is a great image, but with some work, I could turn it into something even better. The software struggled with the difference between the sea and the sky (which is pretty blurry in the original), but that would not have been difficult to mask. As I have said before, you are always in competition against great images taken in great light and so if you are in a beautiful place with grey skies, it is almost not worth even taking the photo! Too often, it can be just pure blue with no clouds (pretty boring), or, in more northern climes, it can be grey and overcast.

Skies are one of the key things that can make or break a travel photograph and if we are travelling around to different places every few days (as many travel stock photographers do), it is hard to be in the right position at the right time to get a perfect sky. (Affiliate link) What attracted me to this in the first place was the excellent reviews it is getting for AI sky replacement. I came across one in the past week (in fact it was hard to miss in the news) – Skylum’s Luminar image processing software. I’m always on the lookout for pieces of software that do one of two things – help my workflow, or create new approaches to my images that will make them more interesting to buyers.

Free skies for luminar 4