The task in this project is to take a beautiful sunny day and give it a brooding, moody, stormy sky to play against the light and dramatic long shadows of a lowering sun. We were provided with an image to work with on this one, along with step-by-step instructions on how to achieve the look in the sample processed image. . . I took a few artistic liberties with it.

Again, I chose to work with layers and masks to accomplish the task at hand. And I wound up with quite a lot before I was finished! I started out with the typical background copy. Then I made another copy of it, which I used to make adjustments to the sky.  Instead of just using Desaturate or Hue/Saturation to desaturate the sky, I chose to use a Black and White adjustment layer, because I like the little adjustments I'm able to make in the conversion of the tones to BW. This gave it a slightly more dramatic feel than a simple desaturation. I then followed the example and made the Hue/Saturation adjustments to the greens and yellows. But it didn't feel "broody" enough for me. And I didn't quite care for the 100% desaturated sky.  So I made a copy of the sky layer as it was to set aside as a backup, and decided to play with some blending modes. What I finally settled on was a Hue/Saturation adjustment to a copy of the original sky, then dropped the opacity on the BW layer, which made it even more dark and moody. Then I added a Levels Adjustment layer to adjust the overal feel of the image. I'm really happy with the final product, even though it is quite a bit different from the sample image given.

But I didn't stop there. This project got me thinking. . . don't we have enough dark, cloudy days here? I wanted to reverse the process, and take a stormy sky and make it beautiful and blue. I didn't want to replace it with another sky or a gradient - I wanted to take UK's existing brand of specially patented, depression-inducing cloud, and turn it into something. . . anything else. So I chose this pic:

Using the technique of creating a sky gradient from Project 18, I placed a new "sky" in it's own layer. I then made a selection of the clock tower and masked it out. I set this layer's blending mode to Screen in order to apply the colour to the existing sky. I then created another copy of the background image, and used the same mask from the sky layer to block out Big Ben. Finally I inverted that layer, to reverse the light/dark areas, and in turn, make the dark stormy clouds into the white fluffy ones shown here: