white sky

[ivory123]

I'm having a great time with my Canon A530, and I would like to ask if someone could suggest a way to capture the blue sky.

I just took some pics of a sky with blue in it, but the pics turned out with almost white sky. 

Thanks.

[RobertTheFat]

The problem is the intensity of the light. If you overload all three sets of color receptors (red, green, blue) in the sensor, the resulting color is white. You have to lower the light intensity, e.g. by lowering the ISO rating, using a smaller aperture or faster shutter speed, or adding a neutral-density filter. Or some combination of those. And yes, that may make the rest of the picture too dark, a condition you may or may not be able to correct in post-processing. If you can't come up with a workable compromise, welcome to the somewhat more complex world of high-dynamic-range photography, which usually requires layering multiple exposures.

Nobody said good photography is easy. (Well, a few did, but they were lying.)

[Skirball]

You're overexposing the sky.  Most likely because you have a subject in the foreground that is darker than the sky (very common).  So your camera is exposing for the subject and letting the sky overexpose.

This is an extremely common situation, that can be handled various ways:

Modern camera phones can sense this situation and take mulitple shots, one for the forground exposed properly, and another for the background.  It's called an HDR and some point and shoots and dSLRs can do it aswell, but you would have to tell your camera to do it.  Also, the results aren't always great, and even when they're good many don't like the unrealistic look it produces.

The best way to fix it is to light your subject up to the same level as the sky.  That opens a pandoras box as to the best ways to light a subject, but I think it's safe to assume you're not using professional lighting.  Your A530 should be able to do some fill lighting with the flash to brighten the subject a bit.  The light quality isn't always great, and this will only work if you have a subject standing directly in front of the camera.  It can't light buildings and skyline on the horizon.

And finally, you can simply expose to the sky, and leave everything in the foreground in silhouette.  Focus on the sky and half push the button to set exposure, then recompose.

[ivory123]

Excellent. I'm looking forward to following through on these suggestions.  My manual says on page 65 that the ISO Auto setting is not available in M mode although I can change the ISO setting to 80, 100, 200, 400, and 800. Instructions for setting the shutter speed on page 45 only list instructions for the PowerShot A 540. So I guess this option is not available with my camera.

What a great forum . . . . .

[ScottyP]

Here is where post processing is your friend. The gradient filter in Lightroom, like its analogues in other PP programs, allows you to pull a window shade down from the sky to the horizon, so you use negative exposure in the filter and you can knock a couple stops of light out of the sky before it looks weird. Add a little clarity to the filter to define the clouds a bit. That May or may not be enough depending on the shot. Sometimes the sky wasn't blue to begin with, and sometimes the brightness is just too much.
This, like almost everything In post, works a lot better if you will shoot in RAW.

I also agree that the use of flash in daytime is great if you have a bright or backlit background. You just need to be close enough for the flash to be effective. A built-in flash in daylight needs to be pretty close to have enough power, as light intensity drops off very quickly with distance (inverse square).

[Skirball]

Does the A530 shoot in RAW?  Post processing blown out skies is going to be severly limited if not.

[ivory123]

The only modes (if RAW is a "mode") I notice in the manual include: AUTO, SCN, P, TV, AV, M, portrait, night scene, and two others in the "Image Zone" -- a movie mode and one that consists of two side-by-side rectangles (one black, the other white) with a white rectangle in front of these.

In the index, there's no entry for RAW that I can find.

[smack53]

The A530 cannot shoot in RAW mode, only JPEG.

Steve M.