What if Your Trip Flips?

We have all planned that dream vacation.  We have seen great photos of our destination and we just can't wait to capture our own spectacular shots.  What happens if you get there and your first four days are overcast, rainy, windy and your pictures look something like this?  So it happened on our trip to Iceland. You have a couple of choices.  You can throw them all in the recycle bin or shut the computer down for a few days and then come back to them when you are in a better mood and try to do something with them.  I opted for the latter.

On the original photo the exposure for the water is ok, but that means the land is dark.  Fortunately, I did shoot this for HDR.  I have one darker for the brights in the water and sky and one lighter where the water and sky are blown out but the land has a good exposure.  I combined them in my HDR software and did a little tweaking on the color and contrast and came out with this:

It is better but not quite there.  I then added a layer mask of the sky, gave it more contrast and darkened it to give it that stormy look.

But, I so wanted blue skies.  So I made another layer of the photo and then did a selection of the sky.  I found a picture where we did have blue skies in Iceland and  did a select all and copy and then went back to this photo and did a paste into selected area command and voila, blue skies.

I then decided to try a monochrome version of the tonemapped photo from the HDR program and here it is below:

So, all is not lost.  If you have done your best to capture the scene, a little computer work at home can help save the day.  You may even like several versions of the photos you have experimented with.