Fixing blown out skies

Another common problem one often encounters with digital images is blown out skies. Sometimes it can be as a result of the image being clipped beyond the dynamic range of the camera, whereas other times the day may simply have been overcast and there is no detail there to begin with. While there are situations when the sky is too bright and you just need to bring the brightness down to better match the rest of the scene, that is easily fixed and we covered how to do that in Chapter 3, Everything you Ever Wanted to Know about Curves. But what if there is no detail there to recover in the first place? That scenario is what we are going to look at in the next section. This covers what to do when the sky is completely gone and there's nothing left to recover.

There are options open to you in this case. The first is pretty obvious. Leave it as it is. However, you might have an image that is nicely lit otherwise, but all that's ruining it is a flat washed-out sky. What would...