Schonhose

I just got back from a visit to Rome, the capital of Italy and I made tons of pictures of the city architecture. We had some nice weather but there were times the sky looked a dull grey with clouds. This has lead to multiple pictures with a “washed out” sky look. I’m quite aware this could be prevented by using a graduated filter (ND filter) but I never got around in buying some.

Besides, there would be to much hassle because you would have to have at least three types of filters: one-third, half and two-third. To top things of even more you would have a variety of densities as well. I can only imagine the filter swapping while making pictures.

However, in the mean time I’m still stuck with dull boring skies and I really want to fix that. After trying some stuff I was stuck and decided to read some feeds from my feedreader. Much to my amazement I saw a post by Matt Kloskowski about a set of presets for graduated filters he has released into the wild for Lightroom 2.x. Needless to say I downloaded and installed the presets in Lightroom.

The effect it had on most of the photos was amazing. The skies showed some more detail and didn’t look nearly as dull as they had before. Here is an example from Matt himself. I’m definitely incorporating these filters in my workflow!