how do I change a completely white sky to blue?

Hi,
Provided your sky isn't totally white and there's still some blueness present, I've had success with brushing on polarise followed by saturation.

Where it's totally white though, off to Photoshop for a nice gradient or insertion of some sky from another photo.

I normally try option A first, just on the off-chance of some residual blueness!

Regards,
Calx

This sounds like overexposure when you took the picture. Is the picture raw or jpeg? if it is jpeg forget it. If it is raw then some improvement is possible.

Aperture can help: Try the Adjustment Sliders...... Boost, down.....Exposure, down....Recovery up...... Brightness, down.......Highlights, up.

I get the feeling you are trying to selectively turn the sky blue. Aperture does not do this in the way i think you are trying to do.

Allan

As everyone has mentioned, use Photoshop or any other graphics program. Aperture is a photo developing program. The reason the editing tools are called "adjustments" is because almost all of them operate on the values in the existing pixels -- they adjust those values.

If your sky is totally white (blown-out, overexposed) then the luminosity of all of those pixels is maxed out. No matter what the Hue or the Saturation, with a maxed out luminosity the color will be rendered as white (a really really really really really maximally light version of any color is, by definition, white). So you need to either replace those pixel values -- which is what editing programs such as Photoshop do -- or find tools in Aperture which will lower the luminosity (and perhaps change the hue), which is what some other respondents have suggested.

You will almost certainly be better served by doing this in Photoshop.

You can do this with a curves adjustment, and then paint the adjustment in to the "highlights" (maybe even use detect edges) to easily paint it onto the white sky.

With curves the way to do this would be to adjust the Red, green, and blue channels independently until you get the color you like. Start by dropping the top right point of the red channel down, and then move over to the green one...

Found this thread totally by accident... But wouldn't it be easy to select the over exposed sky with the magic wand, then Filter --> Render --> Clouds and presto... You have a new blue sky with clouds.

then select hue and saturation and adjust the saturation and brightness etc till it suits just fine.

Easy, job done and you will save yourself about 15 mins trying to go about it with other methods like textures and all that rubbish.

Hope that helps.

Probably because paint color needs some value below 255,255,255 to know how saturated to make the color. I'd imagine you'd have the same problem with 0,0,0.

Keith is right, what you are probably best doing is going through your archives and finding a suitable blue sky, shot with a similar lens etc to superimpose using Photoshop.

Tony

The New Photo Shop Elements has a function to do this automagically.

Won't this turn everything that is white blue?

You could check out Gimp..... http://www.gimp.org/about/introduction.html

I have not used it, it has Layers so you should be able to do it, anyway... it's free 🙂

Gerry.............

It won't turn everything white to blue IF you paint the curves adjustment in. Only paint in the sky part.

Yes - this is much better than GIMP too IMHO