Is Your Sky Too Blue?

Sometimes on a clear day when I take a picture of a bird perched up in a tree the sky is too blue!  I think my camera likes a blue sky and somehow enhances it becomes overpowering.  Take this picture of a Palm Warbler I took in Canada recently:

The picture above is cropped but otherwise minimally processed.  The sky is so blue it makes it difficult to look at the bird.  There are a couple of ways to tone down the blue but the easiest way is to decrease the Contrast setting.  The Contrast for the above picture is about 0 (Lightroom).  I dropped just the Contrast slider down to -72 and look at the difference below.  The bird is easier to see because the sky doesn’t overpower the composition and the lighting on the bird and the pine tree still look fine.

So next time your sky is too blue, try notching down the Contrast setting a bit and see if that helps.

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